


Night Game

by wordwhisper



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types, Thor (Movies), Thor - All Media Types
Genre: (temporary) girl!Loki, Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, M/M, Odin's Parenting, post-Thor:The Dark World and pre-Infinity War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-26
Updated: 2018-03-02
Packaged: 2019-03-14 17:07:13
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 26,763
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13594560
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wordwhisper/pseuds/wordwhisper
Summary: “You took everything”, she continues, voice trembling dangerously, “my power, my beauty, my intelligence and made it into what, this? A writhing, useless creature that isn’t even able to fight back properly?”in which Loki goes back to New York to find out who his mother is and why she’s trying to kill him and realizes that making deals with Thanos was an even worse idea than he’d thought.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I blame this entirely on Loki and Thor: Ragnarok, which made me fall in love with him all over again. And I've been quietly enjoying the amazing fanfictions, fanart and general creativity in the fandom since the movie came out so this is kind of my little thank you for that, too.

Loki immediately notices that something is wrong.

The magic is cursing too fast and he can’t control it, sliding in between his ribs and underneath his skin like thick smoke until he’s doubling over, clutching at the carpet in front of him. He can hear himself gasp, feel his hands slide on the fabric. It feels like it wants to tear him apart, bone by bone, nerve from nerve, almost like something actually _alive_. Alive and angry. His blood is curdling into fire, chocking his veins to the point where Loki’s mouth falls open helplessly, but the pain is so strong that he can’t even scream. There are tears running down his cheeks, his chest heaving.

Another burst of pain hits his lower stomach out of nowhere, spreading like liquid through every fibre of his body and when bright colours start to dance behind his closed eyelids Loki knows it’s only a matter of time before he loses consciousness completely. His reflexes are still kicking in, the rest of his magic trying to start healing him but this is mostly his own spell, not a fight injury so it’s not really going to help. A second jab on the height of his waist is what finally does it, Loki’s back arching off the floor before everything falls mercifully silent. He wakes up desperately trying to suck air into his lungs, eyes flying open, before a sudden burst of nausea hits and his whole body curls into itself. For a moment Loki thinks he’s going to throw up, but when heaves it’s painfully dry, leaving his throat burning.

As soon as he tries to look down on himself, still braced on his elbow, Loki’s vision blurs for a moment like he’s moved too fast, then slowly his thighs swim into focus, then the rest of his legs. They’re still thin and long, but decidedly more delicate, slim ankles and smaller feet, his jeans scattered on the ground around them in ripped, charred pieces. It worked, he thinks distantly, it actually worked. He stands up, legs still shaky, and slowly stumbles over to the cracked mirror on the other side of the room.

The shirt he’d worn is hanging loosely off his shoulders, a little too big now, and there’s a tear running the down the right side from just below his collarbone to the seam, enough to see the shape of his body beneath it, the curve of his hips and breasts. They’re not large, but Loki can feel them press against the fabric with his breaths, the new weight of them above his ribs. His features have softened slightly around the edges, lips softer and fuller, chin a bit rounder, less defined, his shoulders and arms thinner.

He’s a girl.

 

 

***

 

 

“Those are very pretty, we have –“

The shop assistant stops as soon as Loki turns towards her, her eyes wandering over the rest of the jeans that’s still clinging to his hips and his naked feet before she looks at his face again. She’s young, looks like she’s barely out of school yet. Her mouth opens, probably to ask him if he can even pay, but by this point a few of the other customers have started to look in their direction and she apparently decides it’s safer to just pretend like everything is normal.

“Or you could, um, just continue to look around a bit? Do you know your size?”

“My what?”

“Size.”, she repeats slowly, like she’s expecting some kind of joke behind this, “for the bra.”.

Someone’s propped the door open to let in some air and Loki shivers helplessly, the tiles cold beneath his bare feet.

“No, actually I don’t. What do you think?”

For a moment she simply stares at him, then carefully looks him up and down, all business, gaze lingering on the spot where the shirt is gaping open from the waist down.

“I’d say B should do. Maybe A, if it’s one of the bigger models.”

She shoves a white sports bra with matching panties into his arms, the cheapest in its row, a green one with yellow dots and a blue set with something that looks a pattern of tiny, silver horses printed along the edges.

“Oh, and you have to try this one. It’s one of the more expensive ones but it’s going to look amazing on you.”

It’s barely more than fine, black lace, soft and delicate beneath Lokis fingers when he runs them along the fabric. He can’t imagine it actually holding anything.

“I wish I could wear something like this. You’re lucky, if I had boobs like you I wouldn’t even bother.”

“Was that supposed to be a compliment?”

“It’s great, I have that one, too, in two different colours.”

The two teenage girls who’ve been shifting through the green sets beside them have stopped checking the labels to look over, both grinning as though they’ve been friends with Loki since sixth grade and still remember that time he puked in their dad’s backyard.

  
“I mean, that outfit was planned, right? I tried an outfit like that once with my boyfriend’s shirt, hold on.”

  
Without waiting for his reaction she pulls out her phone, frantically swiping across it a few times as she shifts closer before she turns it towards him with a triumphant ‘there it is’. It’s a picture of her on some kind of beach party, wearing a shirt like his, all black and reaching down to her thighs, and nothing else apart from her underwear that’s just visible where the first few buttons are open on her chest.

“My boyfriend liked it so much that he –“

Loki gives her a pointed look and she immediately trails off mid-sentence.

“Too much information?”

“Would you mind if I quickly took a picture?”, her friend immediately chimes in as though this is the first logical thing to do when meeting a total stranger, pulling out her phone as well, “just one, quick shot, Tess will make sure we all look good.”

Loki simply nods and for a moment he thinks she’s going to start squealing like those girls who keep coming up to Thor on the streets whenever he’s out. Even her cheeks are flushed. The others aren’t even pretending to be interested in lingerie anymore, two of the older ladies still staring and the bored boyfriend slouched in the couch in front of the changing rooms looking up from his phone for the first time since Loki came in.

“Great!”, she grins, “I promise you won’t regret this, it’s going to do wonders for your follower count.”  
Her friend actually moves beside him, one hand around his waist, while the shop assistant backs away a little, watching them like she’s wondering if he’s one of those B-list celebrities she should have recognized. Loki can’t believe this is happening.

“What’s your Instagram handle?”, the girl asks once they’re done, “I’ll tag you.”

“You’ll what?”

“Tag you. So everyone can see it’s you.”

She frowns when she sees his blank expression.

“Don’t tell me that you’ve somehow managed to completely ignore social media, that would be such a waste. You could be famous with looks like that.”

“Are we done?”

The guy’s girlfriend’s just come out of the cabin and the shop’s been continually filling up for the past ten minutes, so if he doesn’t want to spend the entire evening here this is the last chance he might have to get in there alone for a few moments. It’s taken too long as it is.

“Yeah.”, her friend says, letting her arm slide down his waist, “thank you.”

“If you decide to get into that whole Instagram thing, my handle is @leamarbella, you’ll find me if you type it in.”

“Did you want to look at any of the others? We have a few on sale this week before the new collection comes in.”, the shop assistant asks after they’re gone, suddenly remembering that she’s the one supposed to be doing something here, “some over 50%, the others 30, but - ”

“I think I’ll manage.”, Loki cuts her off, final enough to for her to nod reflexively like she’s known he would say that all along, “try the guy in the back, he looks like he’s still kind of unsure which part goes where.”

He walks a few shelves further down where the sweaters are hanging and randomly grabs a dark grey one that seems like it should be roughly the right size and prize range, the bras and panties hocked under his arm, then moves to the jeans display on the other side. By the time he’s starting to figure out the sizes, looking through the black leather pants on the upper rows, Loki can still feel their eyes on him, quietly talking to each other. There’s a small cue in front of the changing rooms now, a new row of boyfriends lining up on the couches and it takes one look at them for Loki to see that at least half of them are absolute jerks.

One’s swiping through girls’ profiles on some kind of neon-coloured website that looks like it could be anything between a community for animal pictures and hardcore porn, the second is complaining about how his girlfriend put on weight last winter and never managed to get it off since and the third gives Loki a dirty smirk the moment he’s close enough for him to get a good look. Loki quickly shoots a look at the shop assistant checking the clothes at the entrance to the changing rooms before he’s in front of the third guy in one, smooth movement, pushing him back into his chair with one hand pressed to the seat on either side of his hips.

“Woah, I didn’t expect this to actually work with –”

“Keep your eyes on my face or you’re going to regret it, you disgusting little quim.”

The guy’s eyes widen in shock and Loki smirks, lips moving to his ear.

“You’re going to tell your girl that you were ten seconds away from ripping the clothes off someone you never met before while she was in there trying to decide which overprized bra you’d like on her. And you’re going to pay for it, in full, and if she’s smart she’ll take it with her after she’s done with you and wear it for someone who’s actually going to get her off at some point.”

Loki’s fingers have curled around his wrist, scratching along the inside as he pulls away. The other guys’ have shifted back into their chairs a little and look like they can’t decide whether they should be terrified or turned on. He straightens up, eyes on the second one beside him.

“As for you, George Clooney, I don’t know if you’re actually that delusional or if it’s the testosterone killing that one remaining brain cell you still had before you drowned it in Vodka shots, but either way it’s probably not going to be that hard of a decision for your girl to dump you once I tell her what you said.”

The guy in the middle is watching him expectedly like he’s waiting for Loki to ask him to solve the latest math problem on the chalkboard and when Loki comes closer his mouth drops open a little in delight. It’s pathetic.

“I hope you’re not planning to re-enact that porn unless she profits from it.”, he simply says, pushing past him back into the row, “I’ll find you if it’s someone else and trust me, it’s going to be nasty.”

He winks at the girl behind him clutching what is probably her first ever bra to her chest, her grandma’s hand curled protectively around her shoulder.

“Remember that, it’s the only way to make sure they stay reasonable. As much as they can, at least.”

“How many have you got?”, the shop assistant in front of him asks suddenly, boredly popping her chewing gum as her eyes scan over what he’s carrying, “alright, four sets, two jeans, one sweater, last on the right, the light should work if you kick it.”

It really is dark in there, a single, naked bulb flickering on the ceiling above and the mirror has a crack all the way down to the floor, but it’s enough to see what he needs to. On a few spots the shirt has stuck to his skin with dried blood and Loki grimaces when he pulls it off, button after button until it slides down completely, pooling on the ground around his feet. He looks into the mirror for the first time after he’s slid on the leather pants and is just pulling up the zipper. They fit surprisingly well, ending just above his ankle. The first bras are too tight everywhere, make him feel like he wouldn’t be able to move his arms or upper body properly if he had to and press down painfully on his ribs. The lance bra is much better simply because it’s light and mostly see-through fabric as it is.

It doesn’t hold much, barely pushes his breast up, but it’s still a weird feeling. When he picks up the sweater to try it on he notices for the first time that it has ‘World Domination’ written across the front in black letters, which is kind of stupid considering how many people are going to be walking around with that.

“Ma’am how’s the bra?”, someone calls from outside a few moments after he’s slipped it over his head, “Do you need another size?”

“Everything is fine, I’ll be out in a second.”

“Well that’s unfortunate.”

Loki’s already backed into one corner by the time the curtain opens with one, sharp tug from the outside and the shop assistant steps in. She gives him a deliberate once over, smirking by the time she meets his eyes again.

“I’ve got to say I preferred you as a guy but you’ve still got your mother’s good looks.”, she says, “must have hurt to lose all that wannabe male superiority. Probably left you weak, unable to do anything else now.”

Loki doesn’t know much about them apart from what Frigga told him while Thor was banished to earth, just that they’re the children of humans and angels who’d refused to bow down in front of their maker and chose to try to wreck his work it instead. Most of the children turned out to be giants, ugly, huge beings capable of nothing other than destruction, the others inherited not only their parents’ hatred for this world, but their beauty, too. His mother had been one of the fallen angels, fierce and powerful, which was apparently also were Loki’d gotten his magic abilities and his looks from, the same green eyes and black hair.

The only real, tangible thing he’s ever seen of her is a locket from a necklace that she hadn’t taken with her when she’d left his father soon after his birth. He’d never asked if she was the one who’d left him to die in the temple. He’d looked for her while he’d been trying to find an army and when he hadn’t found anything part of him had hoped that she was dead, but in the end she’d found Loki. Malekith and his minons had been the first of her attempts to try to kill him, a sloppy one because she’d been looking for Thor at that time, not for him. He hadn’t been able to figure out why, because unlike his father she didn’t seem to have an obvious reason to hate him for just existing until she’d targeted his magic. He’d often wondered if Odin had known, if it had been another reason why he’d taken him in back then, but Loki’d stopped going down that road a long time ago.

It’s the one thing that still makes something go into fee-fall inside him every time he thinks he’s come to terms with it, and the last time he’d acted on that it hadn’t exactly worked out well. On the trip where he’d brought Odin to New York Loki’d found out that she was somewhere in the city as well, which had seemed like an incredibly bad sign for someone who hated human beings that much. She’d come close to finding him over some old connection she’d had with Odin before he’d gone back to Asgard, then tried to kill him the moment he set foot on earth again a week ago. The girl’s probably her attempt number four.

  
She’s a good head taller than him, there’s nothing in the cabin that’s even remotely going to work as a weapon, Loki really is still too weak from the spell to use magic without killing himself in the process, and he’s got no cover except a thin cotton jumper and a few bits of lace. Chances have been worse. He lunges at her first, one kick into the back of her knees to bring her down, then one to her chest to push her to the ground and keep her there. When Loki quickly straddles her hips she catches his punch, arching her whole body up and to the side with his wrist firmly in her grip to throw him of before she kicks him into the back of the cabin with one jab of her high-heeled foot. He doubles over wheezing, one hand on the wall beside him.

“Not bad for a guy.”, she smirks, “you’re still going to die, though.”

Loki tries to push himself up with the grip he has on the wall, her figure shifting in and out of focus in front of him. He’s too weak even for this. She circles him like a predator waiting for its prey to give it a real challenge, every movement calculated and deadly elegant.

“My God, you’re pathetic. Are you sure you’re the right one?”

Something about that makes everything run to a stop, bright and white hot, Loki’s jaw clenching as he pushes himself to his feet. The girl smiles amusedly like this is exactly what she expected, then tries to land another hit with her heel, but this time Loki catches her arm first, pulls it down to the right until she stumbles and loses her footing a bit while he throws his legs up around her neck, dragging her down with him when he falls back down. The grip he has on her flips her body onto her back as soon as she hits the ground, Loki’s thighs still around her neck, and he lifts the leg on top to jab into her chest, hard, then shifts his weight fully on top of her in one swift movement. He’s shaking, fingers trembling around her wrists, but he’s still thrumming with energy, lips drawing back to bare his teeth.

“Wrong insult, bitch.”

While Loki’s scrambling up he presses his knee into the spot on her chest he kicked again, crouching down to swipe up the phone that’d fallen out of her pocked from the floor behind her on the way out before he pushes the curtain back. There are three more employees in the area between the clothing racks and the desk than there had been when he’d gone in, watching everyone cuing from the shop and going in or out of the cabins. That’s when Loki realizes that they’re not only working in the shop. They own it. Their evil hideout is a freaking lingerie shop in the middle of Manhattan.

He’s breathing hard, his cheeks must be flushed and he’s still barefoot wearing completely new clothes, there’s no way they’re not going to notice him leaving. They’ve probably been watching him since he came in. The only real option Loki has is to speculate on the fact that they think he’s too easy to defeat right now to blow their cover for him yet and decide to follow him and kill him in the streets instead. Deliberately slowly, Loki starts to walk, smiling at the girl nearest to him when he walks past her. He feels their eyes on him the whole way out, coiled with hot, breathless anger.

 

 

***

 

 

Of course they’re already there.

  
The girl had left her phone carelessly unlocked and it hadn’t taken much trying around to find a few numbers saved under names too generic to be actual people and an address a few blocks down in Soho.

It would have been disturbingly easy, if it hadn’t also made complete sense. There’s no need for secrecy if you can kill anyone who comes near enough to be an actual threat. The house is a large, yellow apartment building with ancient metal fire escapes along the front, two massive, wooden doors on either side and a Swarovski jewellery store and a Starbucks on the ground level that are just closing up for the night. No security, no guards, almost no people passing on the street except for them, dumbly standing in front of the Swarovski store’s display window quietly talking to each other.

They’re obviously trying for inconspicuous, Tony and Steve in jeans, sneakers and leather jackets, the girl in a long, woollen dress and coat complete with matching high heels, which is exactly why it doesn’t work. Even Loki looks more like he fits in here than they do. How they even got this far he has no idea, but he’s not going to let them screw this up, not after everything that’s happened. Whatever is in there is his story, his battle to fight, not another opportunity for them to play earth’s mightiest heroes in something they don’t even understand. Loki moves closer, his feet tapping quietly across the ground. It’s rained at some point and the concrete is ice cold and damp beneath his bare feet, wet leaves clinging to the sides.

  
He hears the guy before he sees him, a soft, barely-there rustle of clothes in the shadows of the alley behind him, the faint scrape of heavy soles running quickly towards Loki, then he’s directly beside him, trying to curl his fingers around Loki’s arm. With a raw growl Loki spins around, one leg coming out to kick into the back of the guy’s knees, hard, before he shoves one elbow into his ribs and pins him to the ground with one heel pressed into his chest once the guy’s landed gasping on his back in the dirt. The light of the street lamp a few feet further down the street falls directly onto his face when stops coughing and looks up at Loki and Loki almost rolls his eyes. He’d kind of expected that Thor would be somewhere nearby, too, after he’d seen the others, he just hadn’t thought that they were stupid enough to make him of all people the one who silently takes out potential witnesses. If there’s anything Thor has never been able to be, it’s silent and quiet.

“So that’s how you’re planning to take them out?”, Loki asks, “I mean your friends already attract the attention of the entire street, but this is even more brilliant, I’m sure they’ll love it.”

“They?”

“Just stay out of my way.”

“I’m not sure I – ”, Thor starts, but immediately stops with a sharp gasp when Loki’s foot presses in harder.

“I’m sure you don’t or you wouldn’t be here.”, Loki snarls. Thor’s mouth has fallen open, chest moving rapidly beneath Loki’s foot and he still looks dazed, watching Loki with an intensity he’s never seen before. He’s probably only won this effortlessly because Thor is too courteous to fight a girl with all his power, especially when it seems like she won’t be able to fight back, but it’s still satisfying. Loki feels himself smile, wide and breathless.

“Then why are you?”

“I don’t have to answer to you.”

“Really? Because I think I have a far better chance of winning in there than you do, I’ve got-” His eyes graze over Loki’s body, catch on his feet.

“Actual clothes, for a start, a weapon back in the alley, back up and I’m -”

“You’re what?”, Loki snaps. It’s too biting, too unguarded, but he doesn’t care. “a god? They almost killed me and trust me, that’s not easy. They’re going to rip you to shreds and make your friends watch and that stupid hammer you’re so obsessed with won’t help against the kind of power they have.”

“Are you having fun fraternizing with the enemy over here while we do the work?”

The guy with the bow and arrow, who must have been on one of the walls backing up Thor has moved in behind Loki, Steve beside him with his gun loaded and pointed at Loki’s back. Natasha’s kept her distance, casually leaning against the lamppost.

“Are you all here?”, Loki asks sharply, which immediately makes Steve tighten his grip on his gun. His eyes are far too soft for it to be threatening, though, barely able to even meet Loki’s gaze.

“Enough to take you out, at least.”, Clint says, lowering his bow slowly. Natasha’s eyes follow the movement, her whole body tensing like she’s waiting to jump between them in case he let his guard down too easily. “though it would probably be much less fun than fighting them.”

“She’s not the enemy.”, Thor chimes in quickly, and it’s so incredibly naïve and typically him that Loki has to keep himself from kicking him again just for that, “not ours, at least. She’s been looking for them, too.”

“Was that supposed to be reassuring?”

“She can help us. We haven’t found a way in yet, but she might have.”

“A way in is not going to be the problem, it’s how to get out again”, Steve interrupts him, “They’ve been steadily moving things to an empty garage a few streets down, but the room upstairs has never been completely empty so they’re going to see us coming no matter what.”

“Yeah, we. She may be luckier simply because she’ll fit in.”

“And take everything with her afterwards. We can’t risk that, not when we don’t even know who she’s working with.”

“What’s your name?”, Natasha suddenly asks, voice quiet but still fuller of authority than any of theirs. Her gaze is intense, like she’s trying to rip of every layer of Loki’s skin and bare his bones. For a moment he thinks of lying, but then he realizes that they don’t know. Thor thinks he died on Svartalfheim, the others think he’s rotting in a cell or banished somewhere to the ends of the universe and even if they knew he was alive the connection would be so easy that they’d never make it. So he moves his foot from Thor’s chest with a smirk and says -

“Loki.”

There’s silence for a few moments, all eyes on him. Thor scrambles up from the ground, dusting off his jeans and jacket, but for some reason doesn’t go to join the others, staying close behind Loki.

“Loki?”, Steve repeats, still frowning while the rest just continues to stare. Thor looks like he’s going to throw up. “Is that short for something?”

“Yeah, for tired of stupid questions and going to kick your ass if you don’t let me go in there right now.”

“They’re gone, the compound is emptied out up to the third floor and they’ve cleared the whole internet database. Whatever they’re building, it’s something huge.”, a voice comes from the street on their left, then, when Tony sees Loki, “who’s she?”

He steps into the light of the streetlamp beside Natasha, all black and with a fresh wound on the side of his arm where something has torn all the way through the jacket to his skin.

“Loki.”, Natasha supplies helpfully while Steve’s still looking at Loki as though he’s trying to figure out whether he’s just making fun of them all. Something shifts in Tony’s features at the name, a brief, barely-there flash of emotion as his eyes wander over Loki, then he forcefully drags his gaze away and shrugs.

“Well at least the sweater fits.”

“You said they’re building something, did you see what?”, Thor asks. He’s moved closer, somehow radiating heat even now with nothing more than a thin sweater on against the wind coming up from the river, and when Loki involuntarily shivers at the sensation he actually takes his jacket off and puts it around his shoulders.

Loki hates it.

“Not closely enough, but whatever it is, it’s going to go down on Monday. And it’s going to be here. Until then there isn’t much we can do.”

“They’re not just here, they’ve bought shops in other parts of Manhattan, too.”, Loki says, “and whatever you think you know, it’s not what they’re really doing. Not the important part.”

“Yeah, and what is that?”

“I am.”

“How?”, Natasha asks, “we’ve been following them for weeks, there’s got to be more to it than that.”

“That’s why it’s me. I’m the more.”

“You’re not going to tell us more, are you?”, Steve says from where he’s joined Tony at the lantern, “not even if people are going to die.”

Something about that, the sure, casual tone he says it with hits hard in ways Loki hadn’t expected it would and his fists clench at his sides, knuckles white and nails digging into his skin.

“No because by the time I’ve explained everything to you all that’s going to be left for you to do is to collect the bodies.”

His voice is shaking, cracking with helpless anger.

“What if we can help you, then?”, Thor carefully asks behind him, “If they’re really after you, at least come with us for tonight.”  
Clint nods, the corner of his mouth twitching slightly with the hint of a smile.

“And Tony can look at that phone you’ve been carrying around since you left the shop. He’s incredibly good at that, you won’t be disappointed.”

 

***

 

Loki’s perched on the edge of the kitchen counter watching Steve opening Thai take out containers to arrange them on proper plates for them to eat at the table in the back while Thor and Natasha are getting beer from the storage cupboard in the corridor. He’s incredibly tense, like he’s overly aware of Loki’s presence and desperately trying to  
avoid any chance of potential contact between them even if it’s just talking.

“Is something wrong?”, he asks after several more minutes of Steve awkwardly moving around him to open kitchen cabinets. It’s probably not the most sensitive way to go about this, but he’s been forced to wait here not doing anything really productive apart from a few check-up trips on the new hideout-building for almost an entire day now and his patience’s running thin, “I mean I get that I had a foot on Thor’s chest the first time you saw me and we only just met yesterday but you look like you’re expecting me to pull out a knife and stab you at any moment.”

“No, it’s just – ” Steve hesitates, looking down at his hands before he finally meets Loki’s eyes, “you just remind me of - someone.” he says, words final and heavy like Loki’s supposed to know the rest of the story. “Her hair was a bit lighter, but she had the same lips and fine jaw and she was incredibly fierce, too. The kind of girl who could knock out an entire squadron in heels without even trying that hard.”

“Was?”

“She’s…different, now. Almost 90, sick. Barely remembers anything sometimes.”

Steve had insisted on sleeping on the couch last night so Loki could take his bed and Loki’d seen a black and white picture of her on Steve’s bedside drawer before he’d turned off the lights, a beautiful, young girl in US military uniform with dark lipstick, perfectly made hair and big, almost black eyes.

“Does she remember you?”

Loki leans slightly towards Steve for a moment to get to the teabags in the metal container behind the stove and Steve almost actually jumps, plates twitching in his hands. Steve Rogers is having an identity crisis because he’s attracted to someone who looks like a girl he probably kissed once during the war.

“Sorry.”, he murmurs quickly once he’s caught himself, “I’m not doing this on purpose I promise. And yeah, she does on the day’s she’s feeling well, but it doesn’t really change anything, considering the fact that we’re almost an entire lifetime apart now.”

“Did she marry, have kids?”

“Three.”

“It worked. They had some security but it was extremely sloppy.”

Tony frowns briefly when they both immediately turn to look at him a little too quickly like he’s considering whether he was about to walk into something he wouldn’t have wanted to see, then moves over to Loki’s side to snatch a few of the crab chips from the bowl Steve’d set out there. Thor and Natasha must have heard Tony come into the flat because they join them a few moments later with the beer, setting it down on the kitchen tables.

“I was right about Monday, several databases are to delete on the 21st and apparently they’re not after you, they’re after the other Loki, Thor’s brother. They’ve been searching for news on him on the websites of all big media outlets.”

Thor freezes mid-movement.

“That can’t be.”

“Why not?”, Tony asks, “it’s not like he hasn’t done anything that would explain someone trying to kill him.”

His back is still turned, but Loki can see Thor’s grip tightening around edge of the table.

“It can’t be because he’s already dead. One of Malekith’s minons killed him while we were fighting against him on Svartalfheim.”

“Well I’m guessing she doesn’t know that.”, Natasha says after a few moments of silence, “she definitely seems to think that he’s close, here in town somewhere.”

“You really are as stupid as you act, are you?”, Loki cuts in, “she hasn’t been interested in him in months, that’s what I told you outside, it’s me she’s looking for now.”

“Just out of curiosity, you don’t happen to know him, do you?”, Tony asks, “I mean you do look a bit alike, the black hair, green eyes.”

“He’s my brother.”

“Real or adopted?”

Thor shoots him a pointed look over his shoulder and Tony holds his hands up.

“What, it’s not a completely unreasonable question given your family’s history.”

“Real.”, Loki says, jumping off the counter, “I just wasn’t lucky enough to get taken into Asgardian royalty like he was, I had to figure out my way off this godforsaken planet myself.”

“How come you have the same name?”

“Because our mother was a massive asshole back then as well.”

Loki snatches one of the beer bottles from the table, taking the bottle opener Natasha offers him.

“Loki was the older one, and when he was born he didn’t immediately respond to her magic the way she thought he would so she left him to die in the midst of the battle against Asgard, then ran off with a few of her maids. His father never even met him, just knew he had a son.”

The bitterness comes easily, thick and stale in Loki’s throat, his voice cracking around the words.

“A few months later she found out she was pregnant again and I suppose a part of her felt some sort of remorse at least because she gave me the name of the child she’d abandoned and spend the rest of my childhood trying to make me into him. Into the child she’d wanted him to be.”

Everyone’s fallen completely quiet, looking at him with the same carefully guarded, pitying expression he’d seen on Frigga’s face sometimes when she thought he didn’t notice her watching. It makes his throat close up with helpless anger and he feels his fingernails digging into the glass, hands shaking.

“I guess being a girl wasn’t enough either.”, he finishes roughly, “not for her.”

“How did you find him again?”

“I didn’t, he found me, not long before he went down to Midgard. That’s how she found out that he was still alive.”

“Was she behind Malekith’s plan, too?”, Thor asks, voice strangely tight and Loki knows that he’s thinking the same thing he did. _Did he kill my mother?_

“Probably.”

“Did he know?”

“That his mother was trying to kill him? Considering what he thought of his father, very likely.”

Natasha looks between them, arms crossed in front of her chest.

“Who is his father? I mean, you told us that Odin took him in as a baby but never more.”

Thor flinches slightly as though she’s hit him, spinning around a little too fast with a look in his eyes that makes her instinctively take a step back before his face softens again. Loki doesn’t really understand why, because for him simply pretending that nothing had changed had always been so obvious a solution that he’d never even tried to imagine that wasn’t as easy for Loki. That maybe it took more than being called ‘brother’ after finding out that you were the one thing you had been taught to hate, to fear, to kill, born in war and destruction, to really be able to be one again.

“It doesn’t matter. She’s obviously after her now, so we need to make sure that she won’t succeed this time.”

It’s probably guilt, mostly. A way to try to make up for dragging Loki into the battle, leaving his body behind without a proper funeral, not letting him see Frigga’s, not being able to prevent any of this from happening. Another simple way out. Loki takes another sip, wiping his mouth as Tony leans back against the counter, hip pressed to the edge.

“Here should be safe for now, safer than in the Avengers Tower at least. And I suggest that we move in tomorrow night, find out more while someone stays with her here.”

Loki raises an eyebrow, putting his bottle down.

“You realize that I’m not going to listen to anything you just said, do you?”

“Yeah, I kind of figured that. I just wanted it stated for the record that I tried, though.”

He turns his back towards them and reaches for the plates with their food to bring them over, Natasha immediately standing up to help, before he suddenly says.

“And Steve?”

“Yeah?”

“If you want to flirt with someone you find attractive, I wouldn’t compare them with ex-girlfriends. It doesn’t usually go over that well.”

 

***

 

She comes to find Loki again that night, an insistent, ice-cold presence in his veins light like perling laughter. It’s incredibly vivid, a swirl of black mixed with blurred images of Frigga, the feeling of holding onto the huge skirt of her dress when he was too small to really remember anything else. The warm, sweet smell of her perfume, curled against her side just before he drifted off to sleep with his hand splayed on her stomach while she ran her fingers through his hair and painted entire worlds with nothing more than the sound of her voice. Sitting cross-legged opposite each other when he was barely eleven eating the sweets she’d snuck in for him from the kitchen. It’s worse than actually dying.

It’s being reminded why he wouldn’t mind to.

 

 

***

 

 

His hands are still shaking when he slips on the shoes standing beside his bed, a red pair of heels that Natasha had given him, wiping his face with the sleeve of his shirt. They’re not especially high, but Loki’s steps still feel off-balance and they’re too loud, scratching against the wooden floor with every movement. There are a few jackets in Steve’s closet, thankfully, an old, military one that reaches down almost to Loki’s knees and a brown, shorter leather jacket whose sleeves hang over his hands a few inches but that otherwise fits surprisingly well. With one last look back, Loki pushes the window open, swinging one leg over the ledge before he pulls the other one up with it until he’s sitting on it properly, looking down on the street below.

The rain’s stopped, dark silhouettes of clouds hanging between the high buildings on the other side of the street and the sidewalks still glistening wet beneath the street lights. He can feel the wind cool against his face, thick and heavy with moisture. It smells like fallen leaves, the last remnants of summer, police sirens faintly howling in the distance. One of the lights in the other room is still burning and Loki can see the faint outline of Thor sitting on his bed through the smudged window, laptop open on the covers beside him. They’d done that so often, too, sitting outside on the window sill or in the garden as long as it was warm enough while Odin read something to Thor in his room, Frigga teaching him the constellation of the stars and the stories that went with them. Later it’d turned into long nights of her showing Loki how to control his magic, his hands incredibly tiny in hers until suddenly they’d encompassed them almost entirely.

  
Loki pulls his eyes away, vision blurry, as he slides the phone out of the pocket of his jacket, still open on the messenger app. It’s a single text from an unknown number, two, short lines with no name below it:

63 Water Street  
Brookyn

 

***

 

“I wondered when you’d come.”

She’s wearing a simple, black dress like she’s just another one of the women in their mid-thirties going to one of the exclusive clubs down the street that night, beautiful in the same cruel, calculated way a panther or a lion is with Loki’s green eyes and black hair.

“You didn’t really think that you could trick me with that whole girl-act, did you?”

“Why are you here, I thought you were moving to that building in Soho.”

Loki watches her sit down on the doorstep of the old storehouse beside him, almost close enough for their arms to brush. She’s radiating heat, sharp and clinical.

“Oh, that was just a little distraction for them. It was so unsubtle and dumb that I didn’t think they’d buy it, but apparently they did.”

He looks back to the river, the lighted city behind it, a few drunken guys passing behind them on the streets with one of their phones turned on full volume on some bass-heavy party song. There’s the sound of glass shattering, whistles and hysterical laughter.

“And I did have another child beside you, you know? A girl.”

“How did you –”

“A chip on the edge of your bra, the shop-assistant slipped it in before she gave it to you.”

“With Laufey?”, Loki asks after a few moments even though he doesn’t really want to know. He still can’t bring himself to call him father, even now.

“No, I wouldn’t have touched that creature again if my life had depended on it.”

It stings, more than he thought it would, knowing that he was not only born in war but as an act of war created in hatred and disgust, a weapon of flesh and bones from Laufey’s own blood. He can feel her looking at him from the side, the brief flash of her smile polished like a sword’s blade.

“With Odin.”

She waits for his reaction, not taking her eyes off him, but Loki simply stays quiet.

“She was powerful and gorgeous, a lot like you look now, actually, and incredibly cruel.”, she continues after a few moments when it’s clear that he’s not going to say anything, “which is not necessarily a bad thing, in fact it was exactly what I’d hoped for, but then she got reckless. And there’s nothing more dangerous than a weapon that you can’t control.”

Loki’s jaw clenches and he wonders if his father might have been the more human out of the two of his parents after all. Somehow that blow hits even harder than the one that was supposed to, the thought of a little girl that looked like him, the only family he might have ever had, being turned into the mindless machine she didn’t trust him to be.

“Where is she now?”

“I don’t know. She went to Asgard to meet her father as soon as she was out of her teens and never came back.”

In the corner of his vision Loki can see her stretch out her legs, the slick, dark curve of her leather boots on moon-pale skin.

“I watched you, on Asgard, and you turned out to be more powerful than I ever thought, much more than that sad excuse for a mother could have ever taught you. She was always afraid of you, of what you could do, and rightfully so.”

She pauses, a few girls stumbling out of the club behind them giggling and holding onto each other’s shoulders. One of them has her heels in her hands, hair come lose from the band she’d tied it with.

“Despite of what I did, you’re still the best thing I ever made, my biggest creation.”

“I’m not your creation.”, Loki hisses, turning his head to look at her. “If anything, that woman you just called a sad excuse for a mother managed to make sure that I didn’t turn out to be the monster I probably would have otherwise. There’s absolutely nothing that binds me to you.”

“Is that what you thought when you almost brought this city to its knees?”, she asks, something like pride and careful respect in her voice. “And actually, there is. Do you remember Thanos?”

“You’re here to kill me for him?”

Her eyes light up with amusement, almost black in the low light of the lanterns around them, and when she smirks she looks even more like him, the same twist to the corner of her mouth.

“No. He is angry, but just killing you would ruin the actual fun.”

“What do you want from me?”

“Watch them, make sure they stay dumb, which shouldn’t be that hard from what I’ve seen.”

She pushes her hand into the pocket of her coat, hair grazing Loki’s shoulder while she looks down, and pulls out a golden dagger with a handle of embroidered ebony. Carefully, almost gently, she slides it into the pocket of Loki’s jacket, then reaches out to arrange the collar as though they’ve been mother and son their entire lives.

“And kill Odin.”

 

***

 

 

“So that’s their plan? A party?”

They’re gathered in Thor’s room, mostly because it’s the largest in the flat, perched on the bed or the floor and passing around the tablet Tony’d brought back from his laboratory.

“Well, it’s not the weirdest thing we’ve ever dealt with.”, Clint says, giving it to Loki after a brief look. It really is an invitation for a mask ball somewhere near Central Park tomorrow night at half past eight, complete with badly photoshopped neon garlands around the writing and a second one for the after party added at the end.

“No, but it’s definitely the dumbest.”, Natasha says from where she’s standing in front of the the mirror on the wardrobe, “it’s a bit insulting to be honest, they should give us more credit than that.”

She’s finishing off the last touches on her make up, the box open beside Thor’s laptop on the desk and various lipsticks, brushes and mascaras scattered around it.

“You think it’s a trap.”

Tony takes a sip from the drink in his hands, winces slightly at the burn.

“Or, well, think might be understating it a little. We know it’s a trap.”

“I don’t see how we have a choice in this either.”, Thor says, the first comment he’s made since he’d looked at the screen.

“They’re going to do whatever they’re planning anyway, the only question is whether we’re going to do something about it.”

“If this was their plan they wouldn’t let us know about it, that’s the point.”, Loki says sharply. He’d never thought that this would actually work. “especially if it’s my mother. She may be mad, but not that mad.”

“That doesn’t mean that she’s not willing to kill people.”

Steve’s leaned over to take the pad, swiping down in the document to see the address. Loki’s sitting beside him, legs pressed together, so he can see him pull up google maps, the way his jaw sets once he sees the building.

“Plus it’s a Friday night, the club’s going to be packed.”, Tony finishes for him around another sip, “which makes it sound even more like tactic, the same one we’ve seen used over and over. It’s a small, initial bang to the real game, the one they want us to come too late to.”

“So we fight.”, Natasha says, “as long as it’s not all of us they’re still going to lose at one point even if it goes badly wrong.”

“Alright, then Cap and Banner are going to be the back-up team, you’re with me, Thor and World Domination for the party fun.”

His eyes dart to where Loki’s half-leaning on Steve’s shoulder and when he looks at Steve again he’s smirking.

“We wouldn’t want Rogers watching the wrong thing, would we?”

 

 

***

 

 

The club is a few buildings away from the new group-base, one of the fancy ones with thick, black doors, fruity drinks starting from 20 dollars and cues of the hot and the rich down the street wearing clothes that cost more than other people’s monthly salary. It takes Loki only few seconds to spot them sitting at the bar and leaning against the wall in the back, matching black outfits and make up and six-inch golden high heels. They even have the same golden, glowing eyes and his mother’s harsh beauty, the girl Loki fought in the shop smirking at him from where she’s serving behind the bar when she sees him come in. The most attractive thing is probably that they’re not just stunningly beautiful but that, unlike some cheap, wet phantasy, they don’t actually do anything.

He can see Steve staring beside him, lips parted around a shaky breath. One of the girls smiles at him, a private, barely there tug at the corner of her mouth as though he’s the first interesting thing she’s seen since she’s come in here and his whole body sways a little towards her, completely enchanted. Clint’s already got two on each of his arms, dragging him towards the dancefloor while Tony watches them over Natasha’s shoulder, one arm curled tightly around her waist to at least make it look something like dancing. Her hand’s already moving slowly towards the knife strapped to her thigh, the other resting casually on Tony’s shoulder. The only one not looking at them is Thor, his gaze firmly fixed on Loki and that look is one of the few things Loki remembers most about him because it’s the exact opposite of how he’d seen himself, complete, undivided focus like all every secret of the universe is caught in the curve of Loki’s lips and the sound of his voice. It makes Loki want to tear and scratch.

“We’ve got ten minutes left, we need to get those people out of here before they can make their move.”, Tony hisses beside them. Natasha’s go her arms wrapped around his neck now, one heel coming to jab Steve’s shin lightly who’s still staring at the girl at the bar, “right now.”

“Clint’s checked the back before we went in, there was absolutely nothing there and the room here is clear too.”, Thor says, eyes moving towards them briefly, “whatever it is they’re probably already doing it.”

A new girl’s come out of the toilets to sit at the bar, dressed completely in black like all the others but there’s something about her that makes Loki’s gaze catch, follow her movements as she leans forward to call the bartender for another round of shots. She slides off her jacket once he moves to mix the drinks and that’s when he sees the brief flash of stark black against her skin, the carefully drawn tattoo of a bird’s wing starting just above her wrist and curling up to her elbow. Loki’d found it on the girl’s phone a few times but he’d just assumed that it was another false tip-off they’d set up along with all the others to get them here because that group doesn’t exist anymore, hasn’t since Odin had been a little boy.

He’d told Thor and Loki about it the same way he’d talked about his parents, something he hardly believed to be real himself anymore, powerful, graceful angels like his mother’s kind, part of the elite guard of Asgard even though they’d never actually had to fight or kill and the only ones strong enough to serve in the temple. Unlike those here they were also unable to do evil in any kind of form, a detail they’d always thought to be nothing more than a children’s myth but if they managed to get one of them, Thanos’ insanity and Loki’s magic abilities at least one of them certainly could. And they wouldn’t need a location. They’d probably wanted Frigga first until Malekith had screwed up and killed her, which explained why no one had come to help him when they’d fought him on Svartalfheim.

  
“I’ll call Banner, you two stay here in the front and Thor and Loki watch the bar.”, Steve suddenly says, eyes on the ceiling, “they’ll not get away this time, not on our watch.”

  
Tony and Natasha don’t even seem to hear him anymore, her cheek resting against his chest and his face turned into her hair slightly, eyes half-closed. It’s good, for something that’s supposed to be an act.

“Well then we might as well just dance.”

Someone’d turned the music up in the back as soon as Steve’d started walking towards the front door, another generic, up-beat pop song that startles the first-date couples swaying in the back for a moment and Thor gins at Loki from the side.

“Was that a question or are you just being a sexist dick?”

“Would you say yes?”

He carefully moves closer, almost elbowing a guy in the ribs who’d finally worked up the courage to walk up to him after staring at him from where his friends had been doing shots at the bar for at least the past ten minutes. Then suddenly the lights go down completely, colours dancing across the contours of Thor’s face like shadows of molten glass, his smile bright in the darkness. With a few, calculated steps they’re hip to hip, Loki’s lips ghosting along Thor’s jaw while his arms wrap loosely around Thor’s neck, his hair grazing Thor’s cheek. He can feel Thor’s surprised, little gasp against his ribs where their chests are pressed together, his hand instinctively moving to the small of Loki’s back to hold him there. Nathasha’d forced him to wear one of her dresses tonight, fine, golden silk with a slit down the side of one leg and cut low in the back and Thor’s fingers are cold against his skin, rough fingertips shifting along his spine with their movements.

  
It’s not even sexual, just staying close for the sake of it, the only ones left swaying slowly on the spot and completely out of tune with the music because neither of them had ever really learned how to dance when you could learn how to fight instead.

“That was surprisingly quick.”, Thor says after a while, breath warm against Loki’s ear. Loki doesn’t need to see him to know that he’s grinning, that annoying, brief little twitch at the corner of his mouth that used to drive him crazy.

“I know, don’t blow it.”

“Natasha did your hair, didn’t she, you look nice. The dress suits you, too.”

“I’m not going to say thank you to that.”

Thor laughs quietly, his hand moving up a little on his back.

“Yeah, I probably should have left out the first part.”

“You think?”

A few of the girls have moved to the other side with their drinks but they’re still not really doing anything, just chatting and drunkenly laughing at their own jokes. Loki’s eyes flicker to the clock on the wall above them. Three minutes.

“Banner’s not going to help, we won’t be able to stop them either way.”, Thor says, following his gaze, “not here.”

He gently guides Loki around a guy trying to dance the Macarena to impress a group of girls standing around one of the columns at the edge of the dance floor, at least three of them already watching Thor instead.

“They outnumber us at least four to one and there are too many people, if we fight here we’re going to cause more damage than we’re going to accomplish. Supposing that there is anything left to accomplish after they make their move.”

“There will be, they’re not that stupid.”

“Are they?”

Loki opens his mouth to answer when the girl of the couple dancing in front of them suddenly raises her head to look directly at him, a small smile on her face. Her hair’s pulled back, red lipstick smeared around the corner of her mouth and her pupils are dilated, a bright, unnatural silver around the edges. That’s what Thanos and his mother had been planning to do the whole time, the opposite of what he’d tried to do with Loki and the army. He would play God in the most twisted way imaginable, shape the world beneath the touch of his madness until he was ruling a planet made in his own image.

“Over your shoulder, left side. Blonde hair, green blazer.”

He feels Thor turn around to look, the sharp intake of his breath.

“How many?”

“Probably all of them by now.”

“How?”

Just then the receiver hums in Loki’s ear, unfamiliar enough to make him flinch before Steve’s voice faintly crackles through the connection.

“Banner’s on his way.”

“In what form?”

Thor raises a pointed eyebrow at him but Loki ignores him.

“The regular one, I think you’d have noticed otherwise. Why?”

“Then keep him out of here.”

“What do you mean, ‘keep him out’? Their leader or whatever she is has just come out of the back and there’s no way I can take her out alone without rousing too much attention, that was the plan.”

Loki sees Thor move his head back to look at the girls, Tony and Natasha on the other side of the dancefloor by now. They’re not going to be able to reach them fast enough.

“And you won’t be able to take them on alone in there either, Tony hasn’t even got his suit.”

“Natasha and I a wearing freaking dresses, do you see us complaining?”

“That’s not the point.”

“Actually, World Domination might be right.”, Tony cuts in from somewhere near the DJ, the music pulsing behind him, “they’re trying to do something similar to what Loki did to Clint and the others with his staff, we can’t let them get Banner. He might even be their game, like he was Loki’s.”

A glass crashes next to him, a few girls screaming excitedly, then he adds casually.

“Nice dancing, by the way Thor, I taught you well.”

“Thanks I tried.”

“What are we going to do?”, Steve asks, “I can go instead of him but even then it’s – ”

“Nothing.”, Loki interrupts him sharply, “whatever they have them on is going to wear off on its own, all they wanted was for us to see what they’re capable of.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m the one who can make this permanent.”

“In a crowded club?”, Thor says, “and with all of us watching?”

“Trust me, if I decided to none of you would be able to stop me.”

“They’re leaving, the last one just got in a car with their leader.”, Clint’s voice comes in over the static, “You need to get out of there, now.”

They all turn around to check, the side of the DJ desk almost completely empty where a group of them had been dancing, the sides just clearing out and another few climbing up the steps to the VIP lounge on the upper level while the music continues blearing. Someone drunkenly starts shouting Highway To Hell even though it’s not the song playing.

  
A few minutes later the whole building explodes.

 

***

 

 

Loki wakes up coughing ash, lungs burning and skin stretched tight over his bones. He’s vaguely aware of someone crouching down beside him, a warm hand on his shoulder and for a few moments he can hear nothing but a vague beep-tone before the sound gradually floods in again. Thor’s got a deep bruise down the side of his cheek, another, blue one starting to form on his arm that looks it’s from one of the falling stone hitting it. Behind him Tony is trying to help up Natasha whose right leg is half-buried under a pile of stones, colored glass pieces from the ceiling lights scattered across her body like some kind of dangerous confetti and half of her dress ripped off form her shin down.

“Are you alright?”, Thor asks, a little too concerned for someone he’d just met four days ago, “it must have been on the upper level, half of the roof went down.”

There’s a frenzy of movement now, people slowly pushing out of the rubble, calling for friends and dates, someone crying in the back while a boy near them tries to call an ambulance. It doesn’t even take a proper look to see that a lot of the figures visible beneath the piled-up clutter are dead, legs, arms and heads turned in unnatural directions. A sudden weave of nausea rises in Loki’s throat and he digs his fingers sharply into the stone beneath him to fight it down, hard enough to draw blood.

“Yeah, I think so. Where’s Clint?”

Natasha makes a low, groaning sound when Tony lifts the piece of rubble from her ankle, skin shining with cold sweat. It’s probably broken, clear cut across the bone.

“Trying to follow them with Steve and Banner.”

“You should help Tony with Natasha, I’ll be fine.”

“Stark, we’ve got them.”, Steve says, one, single exhale, “Fifth Street, heading down to Seventh. And it looks like they have another bomb.”

“It _looks like_?”

“They were talking about it, but we don’t know where or how they’re planning to transport it. They might already have it there, ready to blow.”

Outside car sirens are blasting, the low gurgle of engines being killed and people talking just audible through what’s left standing of the walls. Loki can make out a few policemen in front of the door, securing the building, then a unit of paramedics comes in with stretchers and emergency kits.

“Alright, Thor and I will be right out. We’ll check in.”

One of them immediately moves to Natasha, instructs her to sit down while he examines her leg and behind her Loki’s gaze catches on the girl with the angel’s wings tattoo siting on her bar stool like nothing’d happened. Thor’s attention is on Tony and Natasha for the moment so Loki pushes himself to his feet quickly, teeth pressed together against the sharp pain shooting up his shoulder. Distantly, almost detachedly, he realizes that it’s probably sprained as well, maybe a surface fracture on the bone. The sting of it triggers his magic, slow, burning streaks curling around the muscle and bone. He leaves Natasha’s heels on the ground, slow, determined steps in the scattered bricks and stones that feel as though he’s learning to walk on land for the first time, his legs shaking. He’s bleeding out of a cut on the sole of his foot and despite everything the pain feels good, something sharp and alive.

The girl sees him come but doesn’t give him more than a brief look before she slides out of the bar stool and onto the street. It’s a good move considering that she’s completely unscathed and not going to draw attention while Loki’s going to have all of it. If Thanos’d try to get him now he’d be a walking target. In the end he only manages to close up to her because a tourist group stops in the middle of the road to take selfies and blocks her way for a few extra seconds, one of his hands curled around her wrist as he pulls her sharply back into the little alleyway behind them. It’s right behind a Chinese restaurant, thick steam rising from the air shaft of what’s probably the kitchen wall and overflowing metal garbage containers leaning against the opposite one, the rest of it covered with graffiti.

  
“You really are working with them, aren’t you?”, Loki pants, his hand moving towards the knife beneath the leg-cut of his dress, one from Tony’s old stack in the tower. He can feel a few cuts there, too, beneath his fingertips, an entire piece of the dress missing at the top of his thigh. The girl simply stares at him with something between amusement and annoyance, completely relaxed in his grip even when Loki puts the blade to her throat. It draws blood, a fine, barely there trickle down the side of her neck.

“You know that’d actually be kind of hot if you really were a girl.”, she says, “and I’ve got no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Great, you met my mother.”

Loki forces her hand around until it’s palm out, hard enough to make her gasp.

“Which also explains this. And why you were conveniently the only one apart from them who knew where to be to make it out alive when the bomb went off. You weren’t even there when it happened, were you? You just came back to get something just before I saw you.”

She rolls her eyes, gaze shifting to the other side of the alley over Loki’s shoulder. A slim, red cat has climbed in between the bins from somewhere, playing with an empty take-out container.

“God, you’re from there, too, aren’t you? I thought Asgard had changed, but apparently they’re still all stuck-up assholes.”

“What?”

“Yeah, I know your little hometown. I even dated your gate-keeper for a while.”

The knife slowly melts into a cover of fine, jagged ice crystals dragging along her collarbones and chest and the she gasps at the sudden cold, eyes wide.

“It’s not my home actually.”

“You know if you put half that effort in killing Odin he’d be dead by now.”

His mother’s stepping over a few pieces of garbage, smiling, hair perfectly made and dressed in an expensive black two-piece suit set and just seeing her like this, completely fine while people uselessly died ignites the fury again with a force that takes Loki’s breath away for a few seconds. His fingers slip on the girl’s skin, a fine cut just above the edge of her shirt.

“Don’t ever talk to me again.”

“Would you prefer that Thanos did?”

A piece of sharpened ice flies in the direction of her heart, her hand coming out to catch it easily and she smiles, slow and amused.

“I see you’ve finally learned Daddy’s tricks as well, congratulations.”

“I also killed him, so I wouldn’t be that happy about it.”

Her smile simply widens, twitching at the corners as though he’s payed her a compliment.

“That’s why I’m here, I’m getting extremely bored with this entire thing.”

She steps closer, lips on his cheek in an oddly gentle kiss and even though Loki desperately wants to push her away he can’t move, breathing hard. The knife falls from his grip, clattering on the ground.

“You have two days.”

 

 

***

 

 

Steve’s sitting in the kitchen when Loki sneaks back into the flat at some point past midnight, quietly pulling the door shut behind him. He can only see his back and bit of his blonde hair from where he’s standing, but Steve’s probably the only one in the flat who’s still reading a printed-out newspaper.

“Couldn’t sleep?”

His head immediately snaps up, blushing when he sees Loki in a way that’s oddly endearing.

“Something like that.”

His gaze comes to rest on Loki’s coat and scarf, the light flush on his cheeks from the cold and he frowns, not with suspicion but with concern, something Loki doesn’t think he’s ever seen directed at him.

“Were you outside?”

“Is that a problem?”

Steve blushes again, eyes dropping to his cup exactly like Loki’d thought they would, no further questions. It’s almost too easy.

“No, of course not.”

He moves to stand up, then hesitates and looks at Loki briefly.

“Do you want a bit of tea, too, to warm up? It’s one of Clint’s he brought back from his last trip, something fruity mixed with spices I think.”

“Yeah, actually, why not.”

The kettle’s one of the really old-fashioned ones still made of metal and porcelain, Steve’s back turned towards Loki while he fills it up and turns the stove on. Loki sits  
down on the chair nearest to the heater, shoulder leaned against the window sill just above it and legs pulled up beneath him.

“So, Natasha and Tony, how long has that been going on?”

“What do you mean?”

“Honestly, I feel like it should have been your mother’s job to give you that talk.”

Steve almost drops the cup he’d been reaching for before he catches himself.

“No, I know, it just seems weird imagining it for them.”, he says carefully, “Although it’d make sense, I guess, they both haven’t been exactly lucky in that area before and they’ve always liked each other. I’m still waiting for Clint to realize that he’s made a massive mistake in thinking that she’d never feel the same way.”

“Mistake how?”

“He married.”

Loki snorts, grabbing one of the chocolate cookies someone’d left on the tray on the table and taking a bite.

“What did they do?”, Steve asks after a few moments, cupboard open in front of him to look for the tea bags.

“Dance, mostly, but it was more the overall picture that made me wonder.”

“Yeah, if Natasha dances it must be pretty special. Not that she’s bad at it, I’ve just never seen her do it in front of anyone else apart from those few times everyone got really drunk.”

He smirks at Loki over his shoulder as he closes the cupboard again.

“And that’s exactly what Tony said about Thor and you by the way.”

“Probably because I’m related to his dead brother, the only extended family he has left apart from his father.”

“I doubt that he sees you as family, exactly.”

It’s so strange and unexpected that Loki almost chokes on his next bite, coughing into his elbow for a few moments before can speak again.

“You do know that he’s single, right? Jane broke up with him last month, something about her wanting to be with someone who’s there more than once a month and able to grow old with her properly.”

“No, actually I didn’t.”

She’d been such a constant in everything Thor’d done, the first thing able to make Loki risk his life for someone without even thinking about it that just that makes it weird to hear.

“Does it change anything?”

Gently pushing one of the cups towards Loki, his own refilled as well, Steve sits down opposite him.

“No.”, he says immediately. “It doesn’t.”

Maybe he’s not so different from Steve in that respect after all. Once you get old enough, certain things stop to matter the way they do to people who experience them for the first time and you slowly learn to accept the fact that it’s not you who decides them. Steve watches him for a moment like he’s waiting for Loki to add something, then he simply nods. Loki wonders if it’s an effect of everyone constantly trying to help him getting over his wartime girlfriend.

“By the way, I never asked what happened afterwards. Is Natasha alright?”

“Yeah, nothing she won’t be able to handle.”

Steve’s smile is almost fond.

“She’ll stay at the hospital tonight and Tony’s going to fetch her in the morning, which on second thought probably supports your theory, too. I don’t know much more either, he just called me very briefly to let me know that he was on his way back and that everything was alright.”

“What about our mad club, did you find out anything?”

“Not much apart from the new quarters we already knew about.”, Steve says and for the first time Loki can see how tired he looks, “Banner tracked some kind of energetic activity and Tony’s on analyzing that, but they still haven’t really done anything that would help us figure out their next move. It’s like they killed all those people just for the fun of it.”

He tips his chin towards the journal he’d been reading.

“Fury called, too, and the press is already sending in requests so by tomorrow we won’t be the only ones looking.”

“So what are the orders?”

“For now, stand down.”

“But you can’t stop thinking about it.”

With a rough, little chocked-off sound Steve puts down his cup, leaning back in his chair.

“Can you?”

There’s frustration behind it, a bit of the anger that’d been part of the reason Loki’d spend the entire evening after meeting his mother walking aimlessly around the city until his lips where numb and the shoes had rubbed bruises into his feet. It’d been harsher, his magic shimmering just beneath his skin like a breath of cold and he hadn’t trusted himself to come back here, act like he’d ever actually want to be one of them. If it’d been Thor he’d probably walked back out. Without saying anything Loki stands up, his own cup in hand, and walks over to gather Steve’s dishes, which immediately makes him frown again.

“Have any music in your room?”, Loki asks over his shoulder while he puts them in the dishwasher, “I saw a few CDs on your shelf but judging from the fact that they’re all self-made Disco remixes I figured that they couldn’t be yours.”

“No, they’re Tony’s, he left them there the last time he stayed over. I do have an an iPod with a playlist the others made to catch me up on the last decades of pop music, though.”

Steve hesitates, suddenly weary. “Why?”

“Well, it helps me sleep, I thought you might want to join in. It’s your room, after all.”

When Loki turns back Steve is staring at him as though he’s just stripped naked, eyes wide, cheeks flushed and even his lips parted a little. He’s probably wondering how humiliating it would be to accidentally think of his girlfriend. And Loki’s not blind, he knows that Steve is gorgeous and it probably wouldn’t even be that hard to convince him now that he’s really started thinking about it but, annoyingly, he realizes that he can’t even remotely imagine going there. Maybe he knows too much, the story of the girl Steve lost, found as a complete stranger and is losing again now and the way he navigates this world like it’s still not quite his own, for him to want to consciously add something to that just because he could.

“Relax, we’re just going to sleep.”, he says, kicking off his shoes next to the door, and Steve laughs behind him, eyes bright.

“You know, sometimes you sound just as old as I do.”

It might have be the most perceptive thing any of them had said so far even if he can’t have meant it like that.

“You have no idea.”

 

***

 

 

It’s Tony who finds them like that the next morning, facing each other beneath Loki’s duvet with the earplugs still in and Steve’s iPod running another shuffle. Somehow Steve’s arm has found its way around Loki’s waist, Loki’s hand on his hip and Loki just hears a very quiet “Finally.” before the door slides shut again.

 

 

***

 

 

“Where did you get that?”

Loki almost drops the knife down to the street from where he’s perched on the windowsill of Steve’s room, a few magazines sliding to the floor with the movement of his foot. Thor’s wearing an old shirt with a pair of grey joggers, skin glistening with old sweat as though he’d just been working out and he looks like he’s about to strip off the shirt right there before he remembers that that might not be the best etiquette in front of a girl he still barely knows.

“Tony.”, Loki lies, turning back to the window, “Although I don’t see how it’s any of your concern considering the amount of weapons you leave the house with.”  
He’d borrowed Steve’s iPod during breakfast this morning, one of the earplugs tucked in while he watches the thick slide of the morning rush-hour traffic downtown. Thor doesn’t leave and Loki can feel the weight of his gaze on his back.

“Do you even know how to use it?”

That makes Loki turn around, eyes sharp, because this is a new level of dumbly reckless even for Thor no matter how into him might be.

“Are you sure that’s a wise question?”

A smile spreads across Thor’s lips and he moves closer just a little, a silent challenge.

“Show me.”

He takes another step forward, still smiling as though he’s just been handed the winning hand, and Loki snaps, pulling out the earplug with one hand as slides off the windowsill, his bare feet landing almost soundlessly on the ground.

“You want to fight? Alright, let’s fight.”

Loki immediately realizes that it’s the one of the worst things he could have said, because if Thor is going to recognize anything, it’s his style of fighting, but it’s not enough to make him back off. Moving forward deliberately slowly Loki lets the knife drop to the floor, which immediately draws Thor’s attention away from him for a few seconds, then his fingers are curling around Thor’s wrist, hard, twisting his arm backwards while Loki swings his legs out and pushes his knee into the small of Thor’s back. He can feel Thor’s nails digging into his waist, trying to catch him and he pulls his knee up to hit again, higher this time, right when Thor’s legs start to give. He barely even tries to defend himself, obviously holding back and somehow that annoys Loki even more, breaths coming out in sharp, calculated pants and magic grazing his fingertips.

Thor’s grip on Loki slips with the movement, one of Loki’s legs moving to straddle Thor’s hips as soon as his back hits the ground just beside where the knife had fallen. Loki leans forward to grab it, presses it lightly against Thor’s throat, and he feels it move against the blade when he swallows, the soft thud of his pulse beneath the metal.

It’s heady, the knowledge of how easy it would be to take that last step.  
Suddenly there are fingers curling around his wrist, Thor’s hips jerking up sharply beneath him with enough force to flip them both around until the knife is clattering to the ground and Thor has Loki’s wrists pinned to the ground on either side of his head. Thor’s chest is pressed against his, his hair falling wildly around his face in a way that makes him look like a bit like a lion ready to pounce. His eyes are darting over Loki’s face with that same, unabashed intensity, lips parted slightly and his thumb strokes lightly over Loki’s pulse when he laughs and whispers:

“Not bad.”

Loki tries to twist his hands in Thor’s grip, clenching and unclenching his fingers.

“Was that all? With your ego I thought you’d –”

Thor’s lips catch on Loki’s bottom lip first, Loki’s mouth opening up beneath his while Thor slowly lets go of his wrists and runs a hand up his thigh to pull him closer once he’s sure that Loki’s not going to stab or hit him. Loki’s fingers slip beneath the hem of Thor’s shirt, graze along his spine bone after bone and Thor shivers, gasping against Loki’s mouth.

When they pull away Thor runs a thumb over Loki’s bottom lip, damp and swollen, while he simply watches him quietly again for a few moments, then he’s shifting back on his knees, hands running over Loki’s thighs, his hips, slowly sliding Loki’s shirt up his body with the movement. It’s strange, mostly because it forces Loki to focus on the differences of this body to the one he’s used to – the broad sweep of his hips, his legs on either side of Thor, the way the lines of his stomach have softened – in a way that’s completely different from just looking at them and because now he’s seeing it through Thor’s eyes. Even the way he reacts feels different, lazier and more thorough, somehow. Loki raises his arms, feels Thor’s hands push the shirt up and over his head and Thor’s fingers are cold against Loki’s skin as he opens the clasp of his bra shakily, naked chest against naked chest and Thor’s lips grazing Loki’s jaw.

  
They press to the corner of his mouth first, overly gently, his chin, then down to Loki’s neck, his collarbone, the curve of his breast. He stops after he’s taken off his shirt as though it’s only just now hit him fully where this is going and not quite sure what to do with that information, one hand coming to rest against the outside of Loki’s leg.

“The knife’s still there so trust me, if I wasn’t okay with this you’d know.”, Loki pants, his heels digging into the back of Thor’s thighs, hard. Thor catches himself with a hand on either side of Loki’s head and grins, moving to gently guide Loki’s legs apart and to the ground.

“Good.”

This time his lips are brushing along the line of Loki’s ribs, his waist, the jut of his hipbones while his fingers work on the button and zipper of Loki’s jeans between them, carefully start to push them down. Loki’s eyes flutter closed when Thor’s mouth grazes over his stomach, warm and damp, then Thor’s nose presses against the inside of his thigh and Loki can feel his breaths against the skin there, the quick press of his shoulders just below his knee. His legs fall open wider as Thor hooks his fingers into the sides of his panties and drags them down slowly, his hair brushing against the inside of Loki’s thighs and lips ghosting over his folds.

The first touch of Thor’s tongue is torturously light and the sensation of it is just as strange, everything hot and swollen, chest heaving as Thor moves his hands down to his thighs to keep his legs apart. His skin trembles with ice, a ripple just beneath the surface that dissolves again the moment it spreads onto his skin. Thor sucks in a sharp breath as soon as he feels it, fingers tightening on Loki’s leg, and for a moment Loki wonders what it would feel like for Thor to fuck him properly like this, have him move inside him. He comes with a quiet gasp, back arching and legs tightening around Thor’s head, but Thor doesn’t stop, sliding his hands up to Loki’s hips to keep him in place when he tries to shift back until Loki’s moaning again and pushing back against his movements. The second time is slower, even more intense with how sensitive everything is, and he says Thor’s name right before it hits, fingers clenching harshly on the carpet beside him.

“Show off.”, Loki says after a few moments, raising himself up onto his elbows to look at him.

Thor laughs, still breathless, cheek resting against Loki’s thigh. He’s beautiful, eyes glassy, lips parted and chin slick with spit.

“You’re welcome.”

 

***

 

 

Afterwards Thor doesn’t leave, head lying on Loki’s chest while he reads some pretentious book he’s found on Steve’s shelf to him and Loki idly runs his fingers through is hair. It’s too comfortable, too easy, but Loki doesn’t move away.

 

 

***

 

The next morning all the chairs at the kitchen table are already taken so Loki flops down on Thor’s lap, more to embarrass him than anything else, but Thor simply steadies him with a hand on the small of his back and kisses him in front of everyone. His thumb slides beneath the hem of Loki’s shirt, rubbing gently at the skin there, and despite the fact that it’s a sweet, chaste kiss Loki finds himself breathless afterwards.

“Thor, what did we say about bringing hook-ups to the kitchen?”, Natasha warns from the kitchen counter although she’s already got her back turned towards them again. Somewhere she’s learned how to make pancakes, the whole room smelling of burned sugar and peanut butter.

“It’s not a hook-up.”

The response is immediate, final, and Loki feels something inside him tense up in a hot, desperate rush, a feeling like that moment when the metal closes around your ankles and you suddenly realize that you’ve been walking into a trap the whole time.

“Well, that’s good to know, considering that Jane just posted a picture with her new boyfriend on Facebook last night.”

“Hot?”

“Very.”

“Good for her. I bet I’d still win, though.”

Thor’s hand shifts to Loki’s hip as he reaches over to get the coffee can and refills his cup, then does the same for Loki’s.

“That might actually be true, he’s got a hipster bun.”

It’s deceptively normal, as tough they’re a regular twenty-something couple in a shared college- flat getting to know each other’s friends, which is exactly what’s so wrong about this. They’re dangerously close to becoming their friends, people Loki cares about enough to get him to make irrational decisions.

“Did you just call me hot?”, he asks, sliding off Thor’s lap to walk over to Natasha. She wordlessly hands him a plate once he’s leaned against the counter beside her, a fork and knife already perched on top, before she gets to work on the next one.

“Don’t let it get to your head.”

She nods towards the other side of the counter.

“Nutella and cinnamon are over there, it tastes best if you mix it with a bit of sugar.”

“She’s right it is.”, Thor says behind them, “it sounds horrible, but it actually works, somehow, one of Clint’s receipts.”

Tony is the last one to walk in a few minutes later with an empty water bottle in his hand and still in his pyjama pants and the slight shift of his expression at the sight of Loki sliding onto Thor’s lap is even better than Natasha’s. He catches himself quickly, depositing his bottle on the window sill before he accepts his plate from Natasha and simply says:

“Well that escalated quickly.”

 

***

 

 

The building still looked exactly the same, even the ripped-off posters from a Reggae festival from two years ago still tapped next to the entrance under the remnants of a long forgotten children’s buggy and the cold smell of dinner in the hallway. Odin frowns as soon as he sees him, a newspaper tucked beneath his arm and a kettle whistling somewhere behind him.

“Who are you?”

He’s wearing a wide sweater and washed-out jeans, thinner than Loki remembers him, and for the first time Loki notices that he’s almost a head taller than him even now as a girl. For some part of him Odin’d always stayed the strong, unimaginably powerful being of his childhood that entire realms bowed to, something he couldn’t imagine being touched by time or tiredness like other people were, but he wasn’t. He’d grown old fast, deep lines around his mouth and eyes, his fingers shaking on the doorknob slightly.

“Your daughter.”

“Hela?”

“Probably. Can I come in?”

When Odin nods hesitantly, Loki pushes past him into the flat, waiting until Odin’s closed the door behind them and turned towards him again, still watching him wearily. He’s barely touched anything since Loki first brought him here, no pictures on the walls, no personal furniture or decorations other than a few pieces of kitchenware draped on the cupboard on the wall next to the kitchen. The photo frames the old owner had left on the window sill from the staging still have the generic advertisement picture of a smiling, blonde family on a fake, neon green meadow in them.

“Why?”, is the first thing Odin asks while he walks over to the kitchen where his kettle is still boiling to turn the stove off, “Last time we talked you said you never wanted to see me again even if your life depended on it.”

Loki almost laughs because he should have known that there couldn’t have been a happy end to this story either, not in this family.

“Does it matter?”

“I thought you’d died.”

“Yeah, I get that a lot.”

Odin turns around to look at him, reaching for one of the cups in the cupboard above him, then away again after a few moments as though it’s something that he can’t quite bring himself to do even now.

“You look like Loki.”, he says out of nowhere and just like that Loki’s five years old again, his whole body tensing up and heart racing. “the same, dark colouring, pale skin and preference for black clothes. You both got that from your mother, I guess, she was one of the most stunning beings I’ve ever met.”

He pours water into the cup, carefully, back still turned towards Loki.

“I guess I’ve been a terrible father to all of my children although I tried so hard to only let them see the best of the world, keep them away from everything that could hurt them. Maybe that’s why it went wrong. And with you and Thor, I might still have a chance but Loki –”

Odin’s voice cracks for the first time since Loki’s known him, rough and unpractised.

“He’ll always believe it’s over, that I’ve always hated him and will hate him forever.” He hesitates, looks over to the window. “Just like Freya.”

“Freya?”

“Thor’s older sister.”

“There’s more?”

“Just the one.”, Odin says with a little smile, “our lives are long, you’ll see that it’s not that strange.”

Everything about this is so wrong that Loki doesn’t even know where to start and it would be just like Odin to make a joke about cheating on who knew how many women and leaving them with nothing more than a child and a trail of broken promises for it to follow when it was older. Without saying anything he pushes himself off the couch and grabs the old coat laying forgotten across the coffee table from some late-evening walk, generic enough not to draw attention outside, before he walks over to Odin’s side.

“Good for you, but we have to go. Now.”

“Why?”

“One of your ex-girlfriends is trying to kill you. She already almost got my brother.”

“He’s here? Who’s –”

“We have to go.”, Loki repeats, firmer this time, “you can tell me any other dark family secrets I should know about on the way.”

“Where to?”

Odin takes the hand Loki offers him to stand up and once he’s on his feet he doesn’t let go, gently placing the other on top of it. It’s so unexpected, so sweet in a way he’d only ever been with Thor that Loki swallows hard, breath catching.

“A nursing home two blocks down from Thor’s flat.”, he says eventually, deliberately coolly, “stay closet me, don’t look at or talk to anyone.”

 

***

 

A few hours later Loki is straddling Thor’s lap on the bed in Steve’s room, their shoes scattered on the floor and Thor’s hands beneath the fabric of his sweater, running up and down his back gently. Loki doesn’t know when it became so normal to do this, or why - which is probably the most disconcerting realization of all –, but somehow it did and it’s scaringly hard to stop now that they’ve started this properly. He tugs at Thor’s bottom lip with his teeth, softly but insistently, grinning when he feels Thor suck in a sharp breath, and he’s just about to pull back to slide his sweater off when the girl’s phone suddenly vibrates on the nightstand. After his mother’s text Loki’d kept it here because even if it was still being tracked, as it very probably was, she already knew this address so if she wanted to come here she would do so anyway and Tony and the others had never asked about it again since he’d run the tests on it.

“Isn’t that –”

“The phone from the shop, yeah.”

Thor lets his hands fall from where they’ve come to settle on Loki’s hips while Loki leans over to get it, then shifts to sit down on the bed beside Thor.

“Is it her?”, he asks after a few moments, but doesn’t move closer or try to look over Loki’s shoulder.

“It’s not signed, but I guess so.”

“Is that the first time?”

Loki levels him with a pointed look over the screen and Thor immediately grins, leaning back to settle on his elbows.

“You’re right, that was a dumb question. You’d screw up with Natasha at the latest, no one’s ever been able to lie to her.”

“I think you underestimate me.”

“Possibly.”

One of Thor’s thumbs has started to run over the bare patch of skin between Loki’s ankle and jeans, absent-mindedly tracing the jut of the bone there.

“What does it say?”

Reaching over Thor Loki puts the phone back on the nightstand, the simplest way to make sure that Thor would never get the idea of checking what he tells him no matter how strange it sounds, then pulls his sweater over his head.

“An address on sixth street, probably a fake one.”

He shifts a leg over Thor’s hips to straddle him again and Thor’s lips instantly, delightfully part at the movement, eyes darting over Loki’s face and chest.

“Any more questions?”

 

***

 

It’s a pub this time, small and traditional complete with an Irish flag hanging above the door, dark wooden furniture and a low-budget live-band playing folk-music in the back. The girl from the club is already sitting at the bar with a pint of beer by the time Loki walks in, wearing jeans and what is probably a boy’s shirt with the first two buttons open this time. The guy on her right side has in leaned dangerously close, almost spilling his half-empty glass of whisky onto her shoes with the movement and his knee pressed to hers between them as says something into her ear. Loki can see her reach for the knife at her thigh, one finger running slowly along the hilt. Suddenly the guy’s pulling back and laughing, which draws Loki’s attention to his face for the first time - strong jaw, dark eyes, chin damp with alcohol - and it’s only then that he realizes that he’s even wearing the same printed, blue T-shirt he’d had on when he’d tried to flirt with Loki in the lingerie shop.

Apparently he’d taken Loki’s hint and let himself be dumped by his girlfriend, his free hand trying to sneak up the girl’s thigh now as he slams his empty glass on the bar and signals the bartender for another drink. Very briefly Loki considers just letting her stab him, but this is too good of an opportunity to pass up so he pulls down the zipper of Steve’s leather jacket, just enough for the guy to see the edge of the lace top and the barest hint of the curve of his chest, and slides into the bar stool beside him. The guy swirls around at the sound, already grinning, then freezes when he sees Loki, shifting back a few inches until he’s almost sitting on the girl’s lap.

Loki simply smiles back and it’s almost comical how fast he struggles to stand up, barley remembering to leave a twenty-dollar bill on the counter for his drinks before he starts walking towards the door on unsteady feet, looking over his shoulder in Loki’s direction several times as though he expects him to throw a knife at his back any second.

The girl, who’d been watching him push his way outside between a couple making out on the front steps, turns towards Loki and raises an eyebrow.

“Do I want to know?”

“Probably not. I’ve found it’s generally a lot wiser not to ask too many questions.”

“Did they follow you?”

Loki puts the glass the guy had left on the bar back down on the counter, wincing at the light burn of the alcohol down his throat. It’s a little too sweet, some kind of fruity liquor, but it’ll do.

“Why did you ask me here?”

“She found out about what you did with Odin. She’s not happy.”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

She snatches his drink and takes a sip as well, scrunching up her nose in disgust once she’s swallowed it down. It’s oddly satisfying.

“It’s the guests.”, she says after she’s washed away the taste with a long pull from her beer bottle, “I thought it was some kind of distraction too, at first, to get to you in her own weird kind of way, but it’s not. Whatever she did to them is permanent, and it’s growing stronger with or without your magic.”

Without saying anything Loki downs the rest of the drink in one go, a few of the guys behind the girl throwing him long, unabashed looks like they can’t decide whether to be annoyed or turned on buy what they’re seeing.

“She’s building an army, Loki, a proper one, none of Thanos’ brainless aliens. And they’re not just going to be controlled my magic, they’re going to be able to do it themselves, I’ve already seen her training them.”

“Yeah thank you, I got that.”

“She’s planning several hits at once, two in Harlem, three in Brooklyn, the rest spread over the whole of Manhattan and Soho.”

She cuts herself off while the bartender moves over to take away her bottle and put a new one in front of her so casually that Loki wonders how many nights she’s spent here getting drunk on her own.

“How many?”

“Right now, maybe a hundred. There was a new bunch of recruits yesterday.”

“And you what, suddenly grew a conscience? Realized that they’re not just going to braid each other’s hair and talk about wedding dresses?”

“This is serious!”, she snaps, loud enough for a few people at the tables in the back to turn their heads, then adds more quietly, “you know that he’s after the infinity stones, he already was when you met him. Now he actually has one, I don’t know how or when but he does, and once he gets the rest he won’t even need that army.”

“Is that why he refuses to come here?”

“For now. Considering that she told him exactly where you are yesterday it won’t hold long, though.”

Something about her tone makes Loki turn around to look at her at that, her throat working as she takes the first drink from the new bottle, then puts it down to perch on the barstool between her legs. A bit of her hair’s gone lose from behind her ear, dark skin glistening in the dim light where sweat’s gathered in the dip of her collarbones and between her breasts.

“She told us that you fucked him over, you know.”, she says suddenly, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand, “I respect that.”

“If this is how you flirt it’s no wonder you’re drinking alone.”

“Do you still have it? The Tesseract?”

“Are you serious?”

“Very.”

Loki pushes away from the bar but before he can move off the stool her hand curls around his forearm, sharp nails digging in through his shirt and her leg pressing in between his. The guys immediately turn towards them again, not even bothering to pretend like they’re not staring anymore. He uses her grip on his arm to turn her hand around and slide it up his thigh to the point where he’s slipped his mother’s blade beneath his leather pants.

“I think we already did that, remember?”, she says flatly, but doesn’t loosen her grip, “and if we really want to fight them we’re going to need more than this.”

“We?”

“What about me coming here and giving you intel was unclear, exactly?”

“Nothing, which is exactly why I’m never going to trust you.”

The bartender who’d come to take away Loki’s glass as well shakes his head behind them before he moves on to the group that’d just sat down on the other side.

“You never do something like that just once.”

Her hand is suddenly sliding into the space between his body and the bar, jerking him even closer in the process, and Loki feels the scrape of paper on his skin as she sticks a note into the back of his jeans and covers it with his shirt. One of the guys almost falls off his chair.

“This is the map with the locations drawn on it, hers is red. Use it wisely.”

Then she pulls back, gives him a quick, dry kiss on his cheek while she slides off her stool and walks off to the door.

 

 

***

 

 

“Stark, can you see the ones on Fifth Street?”

“Three on the top of the building, but I have no idea where the rest are. Where’s Romanoff?”

“Onto five and six going down sixth, I’m close.”

Thor presses himself against the wall beside Loki, one hand pressed to his shoulder while he carefully shifts to look around the corner of the building. His eyes catch on the blood on Loki’s shirt just below his elbow where one of their knives had grazed him and he immediately shuffles closer until Loki gives him a warning look. There’s the sound of metal on metal on the intercom, then a crash and a sharp gasp, the low beep of the inside of Tony’s screen.

“What happened?”

Even over the crackling connection it’s audible that Tony’s breathing hard, voice shaking.

“They’re…Nevermind I’m fine. I’ll try to lead them to you, Rogers, it’s going to be easier to take them from two sides.”

“Sixth is clear.”, Natasha interrupts them, “Thor I’m moving to you, Clint’s taking the east tower on the other side of the street.”

“How many left there?”

“At least twenty, but they’re not moving. For now, at least.”

A group’s turning the corner into the side street leading towards them, two girls and three guys still in the expensive party clothes they’d worn when she’d transformed them into whatever they were now at the club. Another one is climbing out of a second-floor window in one of the run-down apartment building in front of them with the focused grace and precision of a predator, landing softly on the concrete at the bottom. Most of them have daggers, the ones at the sides old-fashioned, back guns.  
“Natasha, bring Maria and the others, we’re going to need help here.”, Thor says into the intercom, hand on his hammer. He throws it, but it misses them hopelessly, crashing into the corner of the diner in the closest building instead.

The first gunshots hit the wall beside them and one of the knives grazes Loki’s raised blade hard, clatters onto the ground beside them, the second barely sliding by Thor’s shoulder. A few moments later one of the girls is falling down, hit by one of Loki’s knifes a few steps away from Thor while three new guys come running from one of the back alleys behind the building on their left. Another few shots hit the wall, shattering the glass of the abandoned book store behind them and grazing the old metal shield hanging above its door. They’re getting closer, more precise.

The second time Mjolnir hits the two guys with the guns on the side, the third barely jumping to the side in time and then he’s on Loki suddenly, knife drawn and pushing him back towards the wall harshly. His blade catches on Loki’s shoulder, hard enough to go through the fabric and leave a long cut, then just above his ribs in a way that knocks the air from his lungs, the knife in his hand clattering to the ground.

He sees the guy smile, a quick, sharp flash of teeth, hears Thor call his name somewhere beside him. The guy’s hand is pressed to the concrete beside Loki’s head, hip to hip and one knee in between Loki’s thighs, but he’s still watching Loki’s face as he drags the knife lower to his stomach slowly, almost playfully and Loki jerks his leg up hard, twists it around to draw the guy’s lower leg to him until he abruptly loses his footing. He kneels down to get his knife, runs it along the guy’s throat with one, calculated jerk of his hand. When Loki scrambles to his feet again he’s panting, fingers shaking at his sides.

  
Then Thor’s face swims into focus in front of him, his fingers curling around Loki’s shoulder firmly and eyes darting down to where the blood from the wound is running down into the collar of his jacket. The rest of the group is lying on the ground behind him, two girls with arrows in their chests.

“We have to get to the end of that street, Clint said there’s another base there and Natasha’s probably not going to make it in time.”

“What about Tony?”

“Still in the tower.”

He stops, gaze darting up to the window the second team had come from before it settles on Loki again.

“Can you walk?”

Thor’s hand falls away as Loki shuffles to his feet and moves around the corpse of the guy who’d attacked him, takes a few slow, unsteady steps. 

“Yeah, I’m fine let’s move.”

After a few moments Thor just nods, one hand back on Mjolnir. He’s breathing too fast, his movements so sluggish that he almost stumbles over a bit of fallen debris when they start to move further up the street. At one point their hands touch accidently while Thor’s turning around to look for Natasha and her back-up and Loki’s magic surges up to meet the contact, a harsh and unexpected shock of heat that crackles onto his skin and makes Thor jerk away with an astonished gasp and that’s when Loki realizes what’s felt so wrong about this: it’s wild, out of control, that same feeling of something vicious and alive he’d felt during the shift of his body into the new one. And its reacting to Thor so strongly because it’s not just his power, it’s Thor’s, too. That’s why he’s suddenly getting weaker, why Mjolnir didn’t hit the first time.

“Thor, something is wrong.”

Steve’s voice is unsteady, shaking around the words and there’s the sound of concrete crashing and screams in the background, the dull roar of big engines.

“Whatever they’re doing, it’s not just the others, it’s us, too. I don’t know how, but they’re trying to control our power and it’s working.”

Thor stops in his tracks, exchanges a quick look with Loki.

“Keep going without me and if anything happens check in immediately, alright? I mean it. I’ll be back as soon as possible, I promise.”

“No, you don’t have to –”, Steve starts to protest, but Loki’s already nodding, crouching down to gather one of the guns that’d slid down the street. Thor hesitates, mouth opening as though he wants to say something else but then there are gunshots on the other end of the line and he’s moving, jogging down the street after one last look to Loki over his shoulder.

“Be careful.”

Loki waits until he’s disappeared into one of the alleys before he lets himself slide to his knees on the street, hand stretched out as another surge of power hits and paints his veins deep blue. This is it, the thing she’d been waiting to do all along. There’s no one else Loki knows who’d have had the skill to control and channel that kind of power, which is probably one of the reasons why Thanos keeps her around. Somehow, she’d turned Loki into her weapon, made him become the Delilah to their Simson. That’s why they’d both been letting them do this without interrupting, watching and waiting.

  
Loki curls his hands into the ground and screams.

 

***

 

 

When Loki finds her she’s leaning against the wall of a building next to an old CD shop, white sunglasses on and an extra-large Starbucks latte in her hand.

“That took you embarrassingly long to figure out.”

“ _Why?_ ”

She takes a long sip as she pushes herself off the wall, then throws the cup into the container beside her. Her hair’s open this time, curling slightly exactly like his.

“Because he loves you.”, she says eventually and grins when Loki’s breath catches, his grip loosening around the knife in his hand, “and because you love him. I didn’t really believe it at first, but I didn’t take me long to realize that this whole brothers thing was more like, metaphorical. Maybe you did get more from me than I thought.”

With a rough, desperate cry that barely even sounds human Loki pounces, whatever’s left of his magic curling around his fingers, but his mother just casually raises her hand and pushes him back with a calculate shove of hers, onto the ground and on his knees on front of her.  
She’s still smiling, heels clacking on the ground as she circles him slowly.

“And you didn’t kill Odin, as far as I can remember my orders were very clear.”

Loki’s hands clench on the ground in front of him, lungs burning.

“You know, it’s pathetic, really, how easily they had you wrapped around their fingers. The same people who probably would have killed you if they’d known who you really were.”

The red tip of her shoe swims into view before she digs it into the bruise on top of Loki’s ribs hard, the pain so overwhelming that he doubles over, gasping helplessly for a few moments.

“You took everything”, she continues, voice trembling dangerously, “my power, my beauty, my intelligence and made it into what, _this_? A writhing, useless creature that isn’t even able to fight back properly?”

It’s the worst irony of all so far, in a lot of senses. After he’d spend years chasing the monsters of his childhood bedtime-stories, she hated him not because he was the child she’d had with a man she’d never loved but because he was too human.

“World Domination, move in to Sixth street once you’re there, I think Thor isn’t going to make it back.” It’s Tony, the intercom crackling on the ground in front of him where it’d fallen off Loki’s shirt at some point.

“World Domination can you hear me, what’s your status?”

His mother doesn’t even turn her head while she steps on it, moves her foot around until the material’s completely crunched beneath the sole of her shoe. Loki straightens up slowly, eyes on her the entire time, reaching for the gun that’s still tucked to his trousers with shaking fingers. When she takes of her sunglasses, dropping them beside her, her eyes are glowing bright silver behind the green, skin pale like molten glass, and Loki can see wings unfolding on her back behind her, lazy, soft sweeps of ink black feathers that are smouldering at the edges as though they’ve been burned.

She stretches out her arms, a single, pointed punch to his stomach that has him falling forward again harshly enough to scrape his palms bloody on the stone scraps lying around everywhere, then one of her hands turns, barely perceptible and the power that’s still cursing through his veins starts responding, quickly flowing out of him and towards her.

  
He’s aware of the insistent tug of it the whole time, like drinking poison and being able to feel limb after limb going numb maddeningly slowly before it finally reaches your heart.

  
Breathing hard, he tries to divert her movements, block her with her own force, but she just gives him another kick, almost boredly, Loki’s back arching as he lands on it hard and slides a few meters. The sky’s grey above him, the tops of a few buildings visible between the clouds and distantly Loki notices that they’re starting to blur in front of his eyes, the edges of his vision blackening. His eyelids flutter shut and he hears his own, desperate breaths, lungs pressing painfully against the bruise on his ribs. It’s not going to take long now.

“Loki!”

She simply raises a hand in the direction of the footsteps, sending Thor stumbling back a few steps into a slanting street lantern with the top half missing. Her wings tremble, a silent warning.

“Clint’s here, we’re ready to move in.”

Steve’s voice sounds unnaturally loud in the absolutely quiet street with every word, clinging and metallic, but she doesn’t even turn her head.

“Yeah, two streets down, first right. And be careful, whatever she is, it’s not human. She’s got freaking angel’s wings.”

The surface of the girl’s body has begun to shift in front of her like it’s lost the power that was keeping it together, features sharpening, chest flattening and stretching and legs growing longer, slim and delicate, the hips thinner and her waist a little stronger. _Loki_. His face is steaked with dirt, eyes closed and his skin so white it almost looks bluish, and he’s not moving, completely and scaringly quiet.

“Finally.”, Thor hears the woman say over the sudden rush in his ears, her footsteps moving closer. The fabric of her skirt rustles, flashing red in the corner of Thor’s eyes. “he was even harder to kill than my sister.”

Something about that makes the panic settle in fully, bright-hot aches of pure energy beneath his skin and it’s like he’s stuck in some kind of cruel nightmare he can’t wake up from, Svartalfheim all over again. He had a second chance to do this properly and somehow he still lost him, wasn’t even there this time. Thor falls to his knees beside Loki heavily, panting, his hammer dropping to the ground next to him.

“You’re too late, there’s nothing that can save him now.”

When she still doesn’t move any closer, just casually turns around to walk away like she’s got all the time in the world it suddenly hits Thor. She’s stalling. Waiting until the moment the last, faint remaining bit of life has left Loki and all hope of bringing him back has passed, before she comes for him. He still has a chance.  
Thor looks at Loki’s face, his unmoving chest, nerves alight with real, desperate fear for the first time since he can remember, sharp enough to suck the air from his lungs and leave him gasping.

 _He needs to breathe. Now_.

  
Then he leans down and kisses Loki, Loki’s lips slack and cool beneath his when he closes his lips around his bottom lip and although he’d kind of expected it it still feels so incredibly wrong that Thor almost flinches away. It’s like kissing a statue, none of that quiet power running beneath the surface, no reaction at all. As soon as Thor starts moving his lips properly, gently, a fine web of lightning crackles along them, passing between their mouths and onto Loki’s skin.

For a few moments nothing happens and Thor feels tears building behind his close eyelids, ready to draw back and kill her for this, finish what they started, when Loki suddenly gasps against his mouth, eyes fluttering open. His breathing is still shallow, chest barely moving beneath Thor’s hand, but it’s there.  
Carefully, he raises himself up on his elbows to look down at himself, the white girl’s shirt, dirty trousers and his scraped, bare feet where the shoes hadn’t fit anymore, then back up at Thor with absolute, complete disbelief in his eyes.

“You kissed me.”, he says simply.

Thor flushes, eyes shifting away to the remnants of cracked metal around them.

“Yeah I know it wasn’t the most romantic moment but I –”

He clears his throat, fingers twitching on Loki’s arm like he hasn’t realized that he still hasn’t let him go yet.

“It worked, didn’t it?”

“No, I mean you kissed _me_.”

“Is that seriously all you got out of this after she just almost - ”

He laughs, a dry, chocked-off sound that sounds more like a sob.

“You really need to stop trying to die on me or I swear I –”

Then Loki’s lips are on his, properly this time, slowly pushing him back onto the ground with his thighs pressed against Thor’s and Thor’s hand sliding up his leg, the curve of his back, his shoulders and up to into his hair. There are sirens somewhere behind them, the sound of metal scraping against metal, then someone’s shouting Thor’s name and Loki can hear Tony’s voice saying:

“Well that’s traumatising.”

He pulls away with a smirk, settling back on his heels while Thor ungracefully scrambles to sit up beside him.

“Don’t worry, I can kiss you, too if you’re that into it.”

Natasha’s caught up beside Tony, staring at her half-burned sport shoes still laying on the street near Loki’s feet. Behind him Steve looks like he’s replaying every single conversation he’s ever had with Loki in the past few days and going through the all the ways Loki could use what he said against him.

“I can’t believe I called you World Domination.”, Tony says eventually, one hand already on his earpiece, “Clint, we’re clear but there’s still some on the third floor. I’ll send Thor up once we’ve checked out the rest of the block.”

“You know we’re not done here, right?”, Loki asks after he’s turned back towards them, shakily shuffling back to his feet, “the only reason you’re not dead right now is because she thinks I am.”

“He’s right she’s mad and she’s dangerous.”

Thor’s gaze snaps up from the broken doll in a red polka dress he’d been staring at a few meter away, the hammer back in his hand.

“And she’s got Steve’s, mine and Loki’s strength now, so she’s going to finish this now and she’s going to do it fast.”

“You told us that she was married to your father before she ran off with another guy.”, Natasha interrupts him, eyes narrowed at Loki, “was that true? Is she really your mother?”

“Apparently.”

“Well, at least you got all her good genes.”

“Don’t you think that’s –”

They all stare at him when he trails off, Thor stepping back between Steve and Tony.

“Loki, no, whatever you’re thinking you’re still too weak, we all are. We can’t do this alone.”

“I can.”, Loki says, eyes on Thor despite the fact that it’s meant for everyone, “I meant what I said on that first day, too, she’s my mother and it’s me who has to end this.”

“You don’t even know if it’s going to work.”

“It won’t matter if it doesn’t, this is our only choice.”

Screams come from further down the block, bricks falling and the roar of a motor circle running on full sped. Tony nods at Loki silently before he moves back to talk to Clint again, Natasha and Steve reaching for their weapons with their eyes on the street as they spread out towards the corners of the block of buildings. Tony’s helmet closes over his face, thrusters starting with a low hum. To their left the motorcycle turns one of the corners between the buildings until it’s screeching to a halt so closely next to Thor and Loki that Thor has to jump back a few centimetres.

“I see you’re grown tired of the look.”

The girl raises the visor of her helmet, one leather-tipped foot settling on the asphalt and the engine still running.

“She’s on top the Hilton building, get on.”

 

***

 

“He’s on his way, two, maybe three days.”

She’s standing on the edge of the roof, stomach pressed to the railing.

“And thanks to you we won’t even have to fight. Not here, at last.”

“Is that why you’re getting sloppy?”

Loki moves across the open deck until he’s standing almost directly behind her, their arms brushing, and he can smell the faint perfume on her hair when the wind blows it onto his shoulder. Her wings are gone, faint delicate shoulder bones curving beneath her skin where her dress ends in the back.

“I mean really, you almost killed your most important piece of evidence for the Tessaract.”

The sky’s gone dark at some point in the last half hour and from up here the whole city is splayed out across the horizon and between the tips of the other buildings beneath them, an endless stretch of flickering lights and two thick curves of ink-black water where the rivers flow through it on either side. It’s beautiful.

“I don’t get sloppy. If I’d wanted you to die, you would have.”, she says once he’s beside her, “and you were right, you know? I did try to make her into you, teach her what I couldn’t teach you and care for her the way I should have cared for you.”

Her hand comes to rest on top of his between them, cold and barely covering the span of it.

“I never forgot you, you know? It was part of the reason I went to Odin in the first place. He was hot, but also hard, cruel and incredibly ambitious back then so we didn’t date long, but I saw you once in the girl’s rooms. You were beautiful.”

Each word sticks and spreads, low, calculated hits.

“Did you love him?”, he asks after a few moments, watching a bird circle the tower in front of them, “Odin?”

She stays silent long enough for Loki to turn to look at her, her head tipped up as though she’s trying to catch the rays of the moon and for the first time he notices how much older she really is as well, the fine lines around her mouth and the scars running down her arm from years of fights he’ll never know about.

“Before you were born, at some time in the thirties I met a guy called Rafael here in New York not far from where we are now.”, she says when she finally turns to him, eyes dark in the low light from the windows across them, “he was beautiful, big, green eyes like yours and wild, blond hair that he refused to cut even when he eventually joined the army. It was good, for a while, he made me want to lose myself in this world and soak it all up because he did. We even got engaged, a few weeks before he was called to fight in Germany. ”

Her voice is jagged, sharp with anger, her free hand running through her hair as she drags her gaze away from him again, back to the city below. Her fingers slip down from above his, graze his wrist.

“He died the third battle his units fought in, near a river somewhere. It took three weeks for the message to reach the US and by then I’d found out that I was pregnant, a few days into the third month.”, she continues, elbows on the railing, “Most of the medical supplies were with the army and the food supply was rationed, but a few of my friends tried to share theirs with me, get me someone to check on me regularly. We all had to help, work in the factories, collect scrap metal, do the jobs they normally would have done. In the end I lost it, middle of the sixth month. Almost big enough to live.”

Police sirens howl somewhere in the city, a thick spread of clouds gathering over the open sea and catching between the buildings in front of them with the blow of the wind. Somewhere in the distance, lightning crackles.

“You’ll survive them all - the humans, Odin, Thor. Being in love is what’s going to make you you feel every single one of them, lose the ability to handle it and eventually it’ll be so many that the word will use its meaning. For you, love will never be able to be a person.”

She pushes away from the railing just as the first raindrops begin to fall, catching on her dress and hair. It’s unnaturally warm, like the ones in summer, and she lets it run over her face before she lowers her gaze to look at him.

“That’s the not-so pleasant inheritance you got from me, our real curse.”

There’s a party on one of the floors below them, faint yells, music and beer bottles crashing and the first chords of a slow song for one of the couple dances near the end drifting up through an open window. Loki steps closer to her, carefully, the wind tugging at his shirt and hair.

“Would you like to dance?”

“What?”

“Dance.”, Loki repeats, reaching out his arm to offer her a hand, “Odin must have taught you that at least, he’s always been very proud of it.”

“I’m really beginning to regret not actually killing you.”

“Is that a yes?”

Surprisingly, she gives in, her hand light in Loki’s as he gently draws her against him with his other arm. His other hand settles on the small of her back, her arms moving up to slide around his neck after the first few sways back and forth and she feels so small in his arms, fragile lines of blood and bone against the steady thud of her heart. Like this he’s almost a head taller, her chin just below his shoulder. The rain is getting stronger, shivers into ice on his skin that spreads across his body until it slides over his fingertips and onto hers. He feels the moment it starts to take effect, the way she swells beneath his touch like fire, hot, unchecked power flaring up beneath her skin before it pushes up against his and fizzles out and her breath catches. Her hand slips, grips his shoulder painfully tightly while he keeps her close against his chest.

“You’re not the only one who gave me something of their power.”

They’re still swaying, Loki’s hand on her back leading their movements and her breath warm on his cheek. The thunder mixes with the flashes of lightning behind the city, getting closer.

“And I didn’t learn much from Odin, but his most important lesson was that it’s not love that’s dangerous, it’s the trust that comes with it.”

The song stops soon after, everything suddenly and completely quiet apart from a few drunken cheers and Loki shifts back a few steps, fingertips sliding away to take her hand. She’s trembling, her skin translucent and lips white like fresh snow.  
Loki’s almost at the door to the elevator when he hears her voice behind him, the soft clatter of her heels moving over the floor. Despite everything, it’s still strong, defiant, the same, sweet note behind it that could bring down empires and lead men to leave their wives and children.

“You aren’t done yet.”

He turns around with a smile, slow and clean-cut like hers. One of his fingers runs down the knife on his side.

“If I’d wanted to, I would have.”

 

***

 

Thor’s standing next to a Taxi stand a bit further down the street by time Loki comes out, back against the wall and head turned towards a couple passing on the other side of the street, arms around each other as the guy says something into the girl’s ear. His hammer is on the ground beside him, arms crossed in front of his chest. Loki slows to a stop as soon as he sees him, draws in a long, shaky breath, and then he’s running, bare feet tapping against the wet asphalt of the street. Thor looks up at the sound of the knife clattering to the ground a few moments before Loki’s right in front of him, barely managing to catch him with his hands on the back of his thighs, and his lips part around a quiet gasp when Loki leans down to kiss him, legs wrapped around his waist. Their faces are slick from the rain, the skin of Thor’s cheek warm beneath Loki’s hands. Solid, real. They’re both panting by the time they draw back, lip catching against lip, and Thor’s eyes are still closed when Loki opens his, lashes stuck together from the rain.

“That went faster than I expected.”, he says eventually, hold firm on Loki’s thighs, “Although your friend is probably still going to murder you, it took me a lot of persuasion and three bottles of very expensive Vodka to even convince her to get onto the bike.”

His eyes are bright blue like static, the first surge of a flame after it’s lit.

“She was wrong.” Loki slides his hands down to Thor’s shoulders and despite the fact that they’re standing completely soaked-through in the cold wind that’s the moment Thor shivers. “It’s you.”

He can’t say the actual words, not yet, so this is the closest thing he has to offer.

“You’re my person.”

“World Domination, it’s time to move.”

Of course it’s Tony, lips a little too close to his mouthpiece and Steve screaming something about retreating to a parking lot behind him.

“I though you didn’t like to call me that.”

“It’s catchy.”

 

***

 

“So what you did with her apparently stopped the effect of whatever they used on those people in the club and who knows where else, but it didn’t stop her minons.”

  
The doorbell of the bakery rings above them as soon as they step in, the air thick and sweet inside. It’s late so it’s pretty empty apart from two couples drinking coffee in the back and a mother with her son perched on her hip buying cake at the counter and they all turn to stare at them completely unabashedly for a few moments.

  
“They’ve gathered a street down from here, but Clint’s seen them starting to move towards us a few minutes ago. Two groups, one of ten and one of twelve.”

  
“What’s the plan?”, Thor asks, turning back towards them from where he’s been weaving at the little boy. He’s got a thumb in his mouth, still watching Thor over his mother’s shoulder.

“Divide. Rogers and I will take the first, you, World Domination and Natasha the second, Clint will jump in for whoever looks like he’s severely getting his ass kicked first.”  
Natasha and Steve are sitting at a table in the furthest corner of the room, a half-empty box of donuts in front of them.

“I thought you were fighting.”, Tony says as they come to a stop in front of them.

“Yeah well, looks like we’re just that good.”

She reaches for the coat draped across the chair next to her, a fine, light brown one with a belt around her waist that makes the colour of her hair stand out even more while Steve pulls out his wallet to pay. Loki doesn’t know if it’s normal team-behaviour or just their very way of flirting.

“Really, is that why you almost blew up the entire building?”

“At least we won.”

“I’m kidding, give me one of these.”

Tony doesn’t wait for her to react before he leans over and grabs one of the remaining donuts and neither of them even turns their heads as though this is something they’ve seen too often for them to bother to say anything. The girl at the table closest to them looks like she’s desperately trying to find something witty enough to say to ask him for a photo, phone clutched in her hand. Her boyfriend’s texting on his, laptop open in front of him.

“Stark, you have to get out of here.”

They all freeze at the tone in Clint’s voice, immediately and instinctively, which makes the other two tables stop to look at them as well. Thor silently meets Loki’s eyes, pushing off the wall he’d been leaning against.

“And get the people out, fast, or they’re going to be trapped in there.”

A few seconds later the connection crackles into static and is gone. Loki sees the little boy swaying towards Tony out of the corner of his eye, a pen and a piece of paper clutched tightly in his hands, then the door’s exploding into a scatter of glass and wood. There are screams, people scrambling up from their chairs and Natasha quickly moves to swipe the boy up in her arms when he stops in his tracks crying, one hand on his back and the other on the back of his head as Steve starts to usher the people near him to the back door.

“Loki.”

The clothes Tony’s wearing shift into his armour, only the helmet open, Loki’s eyes trained on the door while he pulls out his knife. They don’t look human anymore, shimmering skin like fresh ash, black smudges around their eyes and the sharp teeth of a predator, fine, dark wings like his mother’s spreading out behind their backs. One of them grabs the shop assistant behind the counter, long nails curling around her neck.

“What the hell are they?”

The hinges on the suit buzz lowly with his movement, coming to a stop beside Loki.

“Stark, the second group is in the street out the back, at least ten.”

  
Natasha has her arm around the boy’s mother just outside the shop, looking at them over her shoulder.

  
“We need you to move, now.”

  
Tony’s gaze darts to Thor, hammer raised, then back to Loki.

“Can you handle this?”

“Go.”

The shop window crashes as well, one of them landing perched on the counter, three more beside the door with the others.

“Stark!”

Thor follows Loki in front of the others and towards the entrance area with a few long, purposeful steps, the easy, heightened awareness they’d always had of each other in situations like this kicking in like instinct. Loki catches a flash of Steve rushing back into the room, Natasha holding the door open for the last few people before two of the girls are on him, lips drawn back in a snarl and hands curling into his shoulder harshly. He stumbles back a few steps, leg hitting the side of a chair and pushing it towards the wall with him, the left one’s shoulder bumping into his as the other one curls her fingers around his bicep firmly. She’s cold, smells like molten candle wax. Her claws cut through his skin easily, sudden, pulsing bursts of pain that make Loki’s breath catch, slipping further down his arm when she jerks him roughly to the side, against the second one’s chest. He feels the tip of her knife press against his back just before he drives his in below her ribs between them, elbow digging into the side of the other girl beside him. She loses her footing, enough for her grip on Loki to loosen a bit.

The knife gets stuck on the way out for a few seconds, the girl’s body sagged against his, but she’s still breathing, trying to hold onto Loki’s forearm. With a rough cry he draws his knee up and sets the heel of his foot against her abdomen, shoving her back onto the floor, then catches the other one’s wrist with hand of the arm she’s not holding, back to chest and his arm settling across her throat, before he pushes the knife in right above heart. His arm’s still throbbing and he feels his magic trying to spread into the damaged tissue, but it’s not healing. In the few seconds it takes Loki to get his knife out he notices another one charging at him from somewhere behind Thor’s shoulder, wings spread and letting out a raw, shrieking scream that leaves him panting while she lands with her feet on his stomach, then kicks again once he’s on his back.

  
The knife clatters to the ground, her knees settling on either side of his chest. There’s blood on her neck and the curve of her bottom lip, part of it smeared across her chin. Calmly she places one palm over his heart, grins when she feels its fast beat against her hand, and Loki’s arm snaps up to catch it, her claws digging into air, jerks his whole body upwards until she loses her balance and he’s perched above her with his fingers still curled around her wrist.

  
At his right a new weave is moving in through the back door, splitting up between him and Thor and Loki quickly shoves the knife into the girl’s neck, throws the second at the one coming at him from side as he struggles back onto his feet. His other arm moves up in front of him, blade outwards, pressing against the neck of the second girl who slides to a stop right in front of him. He notices the shift in her stance to late, her first blow going directly into the wound the first girl’d made on his arm with her claws and grabbing his jaw with the second, her fingers curling tightly around it while she walks Loki backwards into the wall. His back hits the bricks, hard, the tip of her dagger coming to rest against the hollow of his throat right above the edge of his neckline. The tip of her foot is digging into his thigh, Loki’s hands trapped in her free one above his head. She’s leaning back slightly to get more leverage for the killing move when her eyes suddenly go wide, staggering backwards as though some vital string inside her has been cut while her hands come up to her chest. On her right Loki sees Natasha laying in the line of the shot right outside the back entrance, holding herself up with one palm on the ground.

“I’m fine.”, she says as soon as Loki starts to move towards her, “go get the rest.”

He ignores her, crouching down beside her as he sneaks an arm around her waist, gently pulls her up with him with her body pressed tightly against his side. Her leather armour is ripped open a good few centimetres across her hip, wet with blood beneath Loki’s hand every time his fingers brush across the area. If a wound from them hurt like this for him, he can only imagine how it is for her. Natasha’s hand closes around his waist, leaning into him more than she’s walking and she’s surprisingly heavy, muscles tightly coiled with the effort to walk.

  
Inside the shop something crashes, metal against glass. Tony and Steve are nowhere to be seen, but Loki can hear their voices from somewhere around the street corner, a few of the people they brought out of the bakery still standing huddled in front of a nearby shop to watch. Reflex, probably, dumb, human curiosity. A few moments later a shadow settles on the street lantern at the street corner, crouching right on the edge with her teeth bared before she jumps, landing lightly on the ground right in front of them. Loki’s knife settles between her ribs somewhere, the second and last one, but she still doesn’t make a sound. Then something crashes into his ribcage hard enough to make him stumble forward, Natasha’s nails digging into his skin with a low, pained gasp as his grip slips over her open wound roughly. It feels like a physical touch at first, curling around his waist, stomach and neck, then liquid fire starts to run in between his bones, spreads into his veins. The girl that’d been charging at them from a nearby alley side falls to the ground, her body curling into itself before she goes completely still.

Behind her a young woman somewhere in her late twenties is shifting through the clothing racks of an American Apparel on the others side of the street, smiling at Loki when she catches his eye. Her hold on his neck tightens, not enough to actually choke him, but enough to show him that she could if she chose to and it’s strong, deeper and more active that his mother’s power had ever been.

  
A few seconds later she’s gone.

 

***

 

It’s over soon after that, the street covered with dust where the bodies have dissolved.

  
It still smells burned, sickeningly sweet. It’s Clint who takes Natasha back for a check-up on this time and when he leaves with his car Loki catches another glimpse of the girl, the quick twitch of a smile and a flash of a blue coat, mouth silver like starlight.

 

***

 

Thor’s perched above Loki on the narrow bed in his room, hands on either side of Loki’s shoulders as he pulls away with one last nip to Loki’s bottom lip. He shifts back onto his knees to pull his sweater over his head and when Loki’s hands move for the button of Thor’s jeans between them, he presses back against the pressure of his fingers, already hard against Loki’s thigh. It’s gone fully dark outside at some point, his body outlined against the wall and hair bright white with moonlight.

  
“You know you’re a lot hotter like this.”, he Thor breathes once the sweater discarded somewhere to the side, his fingertips grazing Loki’s chest with each button of his shirt he opens. His gaze flickers over Loki’s skin, catching on the scar just above his stomach, and he reaches out to trace it gently with his thumb, up to the line of Loki’s ribs before he moves in to kiss him again, hips pressed against Loki’s. When he pushes inside, Loki’s eyes fall closed, nails dragging down Thor’s back harshly as Thor buries his face in Loki’s neck, breaths warm and fast against Loki’s shoulder.

He starts to move deliberately slowly, eyes on Loki’s face the entire time, and he’s even more stunning like this, sun-kissed skin glistening with sweat and his muscles moving beneath it, the calculated, smooth slide of his body. His fingers slide up Loki’s wrist and in between Loki’s, pressing in harder a few times so that he stays almost the whole way in the entire time until Loki pushes his heels into the mattress, uses the leverage to flip them around and settles on top of Thor with one knee on either side of his hips, Thor’s hands pressed to the bed above his head. His lips are parted, looking at Loki like he’s the most amazing thing he’s ever going to see, lightning, thunder and exploding stars.

The grip he has on Loki’s hand tightens at the first roll of Loki’s hips, fingers twitching against Loki’s as though he desperately wants to reach out and touch, but he doesn’t try to break free. Loki chases the change in his pulse and the small witches of his hips beneath him, listens to Thor’s chocked gasps and moans until it starts to get good for him again as well, suddenly and abruptly, jaw going slack. Thor’s looking up at him with the same open-mouthed, unconcealed awe, lips parted and damp with spit, and Loki realizes that this must be like a second first time for him even more than it is for Loki, Loki’s own face, his voice and the noises he’s making, the feel of his body beneath his hands. He shudders when Loki kisses him, just at that, fingers tightening around Loki’s again. It’s him who says Loki’s name this time, one, breathless gasp before his eyes fall closed and everything runs silent.

 

 

***

 

 

_You look nicer than I expected, considering your father._

Loki’s sitting in a coffee shop down the street at one of the tables in front of the window, a large cup of straight black espresso and the book Thor’d read to him in Steve’s room in front of him. He turns around towards the bar when he sees the text where the first queue of bankers and students from the nearby campus is gathering in front of the cashier while a group of women somewhere in their thirties are having an early lunch break in the corner. He sees her immediately, dark hair, tight jeans and a fine, green sweater, perched on one of the chairs at the edge of the bar with her hands curled around a big, white cup of something steaming hot.

_Nice to meet you brother, it’s about time._

 

  _Which one are you?_

 

She takes up her phone, quickly typing with one thumb before she sets it down again and leans back, raising her cup to her lips with both hands to take a long sip.

_Hela. Odin’s firstborn and probably soon new Queen of Asgard. You do realize that you left that place basically unguarded, do you?_

One of the waitresses suddenly appears beside Loki with a plate of chocolate cookies and a refill for his cup and Loki has to fight not to instinctively jerk the screen away from her, placing it beside the book instead. He thanks her, gives her a smile long enough to make her blush and duck away.

 

_What are you doing here, then?_

 

 _My ambitions are bigger than Asgard._  

 

She smirks at him briefly over her phone, then three simple words pop up on Loki’s screen.

  _And he’s here._


	2. Epilogue

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> a little bonus because they won't let me live and I probably won't have time to write the proper sequel it deserves anytime soon so, enjoy?

“I was hoping it'd be you.”

Odin’s sitting in an armchair near the window sill, looking out at the little town square behind the building. He’s wearing a new sweater and nice, grey jeans, fingers tapping absent-mindedly against his thigh in the same way that Loki’d always used to and Loki wonders how he ever missed how much he picked up from him, too. 

“How?”

Loki leans against the wall beside the window, the concrete cold against his shoulder.

“Small details about how you moved and the way you reacted to the things I said. And she never really knew you, so when she called you her brother I knew that it couldn’t be her.”

“Why didn’t she?”

“Because I was afraid.”

He takes the brown plastic cup of cheap coffee from the machine down the hall Loki offers him, but his eyes stay firmly fixed on Loki.

“Afraid that you’d turn out to be like her, that you both would. That’s why I didn’t let your mother take you when she asked me to, tried to protect you the way I couldn’t protect our daughter later.”

“She asked you for me?”

“Every day until she left.”

“Did Frigga ever know?”

“That I had a child? She did, yes.”

A bell rings somewhere as he slowly pushes himself off his chair, joins Loki at the window. It’s started rain again, thick dark clouds gathering behind the buildings.

“What did she say?”

“It was never important. She knew that I loved her and somehow, miraculously, that was enough for her to stay.”

He pauses, clears his throat.

“And then Thor was born and the war came, and suddenly she had a second, too, one she fell in love with from the first moment she saw it.”

Loki closes his eyes, because he can’t let himself cry before Odin, not even now, and behind his eyelids there’s hair warm like sunlight grazing his cheek and fingers soothingly running down his small back.

“I’ve never really been good with small children, so Frigga stayed with you often and you refused to sleep or eat until she took you into her arms, close enough for you to feel her heartbeat, and sang to you.”, he continues and Loki can hear the curl of Odin’s smile in his voice, gentle in a way he hasn’t heard it in years, “you were fascinated with her hair, too, always trying to tug at it or play with it while she fed you. It was one of the many reasons that made me fall in love with her anew every day, the way she was with you.”

He feels Odin’s gaze come to rest on him from the side, a brief flash of warmth grazing his skin. Loki doesn’t look back, curls his fingers around his cup instead.

“My mother told me that my sister came to visit you when she was a teenager and never came back afterwards.”, he says after he’s put it down again. “What happened during that visit?”

“She came with literally nothing, just the dress and leather boots she was wearing when she left, and she was gorgeous, more like her mother than me. Frigga found her near the bridge, brought her to me. I think she found me pretty boring, not exactly what she’d hoped for.”  
Odin’s hand comes to rest on his between them, warm and unexpected, the same, gentle gesture from that evening his flat before Loki’d brought him here.

“She got on pretty well with Thor, but she hated you and when she almost killed you I had her sent off again. I always thought she went back to her mother, so I don’t know what she did after that.”

When Loki faces him Odin’s taking another sip of his coffee with his free hand, scrunching up his nose in a way that looks surprisingly undignified as soon as he’s swallowed it down.

“Was she the mysterious Princess from Edom you supposedly brought back from one of your missions?”, he asks, still incredulous, “the one Thor had a crush on for at least three weeks?”

“Did I call her that?”

“Yeah I’m pretty sure you did.”

“Well, it wasn’t entirely wrong. It’s your mother’s realm.”

“Were you ever going to tell us about her?”

Odin’ hand tenses on his between them, almost flinching away, and Loki knows that he hears what he doesn’t say, too.

“You know now why I couldn’t.”, he says eventually, every word infuriatingly calm like he’s trying to break something to Loki gently, “why Thor still can’t know, or anyone else apart from those who already do.”

For a moment Loki’s speechless with disbelief, old, scorching-hot pain like a barely-healed wound picked open but then he realizes that there’s really nothing more left that that. He doesn’t even care enough anymore to want to reply this time, try to hurt back, which is in its own way even more scary. 

“Do you know why she would be working with Thanos?”

“No, I just know that your mother went to him after she left me, but your sister is incredibly strong, it’d make sense that she’d try to use that.”

He pauses, deliberately and just the right amount of time for it to become uncomfortable like he used to when Thor and Loki were kids and he tried to find out what they’d done.

“It’s somewhere here with me, isn’t it? The Tessaract?”

“Nearby. Safe, for now.”

“So she’s not after you, she’s after the Infinity stones.”

“They both are.”, Loki says, picking up Odin’s empty cup to throw it away with his, “he never told me his full plans, but apparently Thanos’ decided to come here in person and I’m pretty sure that the Tessaract is one of the reasons why.”

“I would gladly help you, but my time for these kinds of fights is over, has been for a while now and I know that you won’t need me anyway.”

He squeezes, Loki’s hand, once, warm and unexpectedly strong.

“You’re both already better than I’ll ever be.”

 

 

***

 

 

“What did he –”

Loki’s on Thor before he can say more, mouth catching against his while settles onto Thor’s lap on the motorcycle, the metal handlebar pressing against his back. Their lips brush, breath against breath, then Thor opens his mouth to kiss back properly and it’s still frighteningly good, thrumming currents of power and addictive recklessness.

“So you’re Thor’s new conquest.”

The girl leaning against a garden fence a few feet away looks like she’s barely out of her teens, red hair and a bright summer’s dress ending just above her knees with a pair of scuffed biker boots matching her coat. Her nails are painted black as well, the colour chipped at the edges and the pale sunlight catching on the silver rings on her fingers.

“Do I know you?”

She ignores him, throwing her phone at Loki so suddenly that he barely manages to catch it.

“Someone called Stephen Strange send us a message this morning telling us that a space ship has landed somewhere near Coney Island. They’re calling in all avaliable units.”

“Where are they now?”

“Moving towards the city, at least two hundred.”

There’s a map open on the screen, red sensors moving quickly towards the outskirts of Queens and Brooklyn on one of the highways and along the beach.

“How long?”

“An hour, at most.”

“How fast can ours be here?”, Thor asks behind him, hands still resting loosely on Loki’s thighs.

“Not fast enough. Steve and Tony are already in Brooklyn, but that’s not going to hold them back for long.”

“What about you?”

She raises an eyebrow, reaching over to take her phone back. 

“I’m going to pretend I never heard that.”

“Do you have a ride?”

“A better one than you.”

“Alright, let’s go then.”

Loki swings his leg off the seat to move into the seat behind Thor, arms wrapped around his waist.

“Give them hell.”

 

 

***

 

 

“How did it go?”

“What do you think?”

Hela joins her mother at one of the tables outside the small corner coffee, her legs stretched out beneath it and two cups of black Mocca already standing in front of her. A young waiter is just coming over to them with two pieces of cake from the little bakery inside, almost tripping over his feet when his eyes catch on Hela. 

“He bought it.”

“Of course he did.”

She pushes her sunglasses up and into her hair, reaches for her fork.

“Sentiment.”

“So Odin really managed to win his love, somehow.”

“My brother craves his, I don’t know if that’s the same thing.”

The cake is still warm inside, thick with molten chocolate.

“Thanos’ found the time stone while you were gone, in the house of some strange guy with an English accent who thinks he knows how to use magic. He survived, but the stone’s in the ship now.”

“What about my father, did he survive?”

“Not for long.”

She watches Hela eat her first spoon-full, absent-mindedly stirring her coffee with the spoon that’d been laying beside it.

“Though he was a little too motivated for my taste, Frigga’s death made him soft.”

“I didn’t expect any different.”

“They will be.”

“I know.” The fork scrapes against Hela's plate briefly, metal against porcelain “that’s going to make it even more fun.”


	3. Bonus Scene: The Queen's Son

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warnings for dubious consent and well, Laufey l guess?

Two, calculated tugs of her fingers and the silk robe slips open, slides down her shoulders until it’s pooling at her feet. It feels like a graze of winter’s rain, cold like everything else here. Laufey watches her from where he’s laying propped on the cushions at the edge of the bed, completely quiet, his eyes flickering over her neck, the curve of her breasts, down to her stomach, the line of her thighs. His chest is already rising in falling faster, one foot propped up on the mattress. Slowly, he reaches down to undo the flies of his pants, gaze set firmly on her, then shifts forward to get them down his legs and off the bed. When she presses her chest to his, lips against his neck, he gasps, his eyes fingers twitching at his sides, but he still doesn’t make a move to touch her.

At the points where their skin meets, his trembles with warmth. His thighs start to shake against hers once she grounds her hips down, their lips catching against each other and she smiles at the shaky, little moan he gives, does it again. One of his hands slides up her leg, then her fingers graze over his cock between them and he draws his mouth away from hers to suck in a breath against her cheek. He’s already hard, pushing up against the pressure of her palm. She wonders if he even notices that they’re not shaking, the calculated efficiency of her movements and the way her breath is still almost entirely quiet against his ear or if he simply doesn’t care. The other hand settles on the small of her back, cool and dry, holding her close while he gently guides her onto her back on the bed. He starts to push into her slowly, his hand holding her leg up and against his waist while her heels press harshly into the back of his thighs with the sudden, dull burst of pain. 

His breath is grazing her neck, chest against chest and the fingers of his other hand intertwined with hers beside her head. The first proper move makes the sting swell up to a steady throb for a moment, and she feels a tear run down her cheek, her mouth fall open around a hitching gasp as she lets her eyes drop closed. His fingers tighten around hers, trembling, before he pushes in harder, and when he kisses her, her lips taste like freshly fallen snow. 

She holds him after he’s come, his head resting on her chest and one hand curled around her waist. He’s still softening inside her when he pushes himself up a little, lips grazing her breast, and presses his fingers between her folds, hard and fast, until she’s arching her back and coming, too.

 

 

***

 

 

The first time the child only survives the first three months, not much more than the hint of a being yet. It happens quietly, late at night in her room, and it surprises her how much it hurts, a desperate, burning sense of a loss of something deeply interwoven with her own being that makes it hard to breathe. Her fingernails draw blood against her palms, but she’s too weak to even cry.

 

***

 

He keeps coming to her almost every night not long after that, wordlessly locking the door before he pushes her back onto the bed and slides her night gown off her shoulders.  
The first time she almost slaps him, but he catches her hand and places it on his back instead. After the second, she simply stares at the ceiling, listening to the noises he’s making into her shoulder and waits for him to be done. 

Afterwards he leaves a spread of icy roses along the edge of her bed that melt beneath the touch of her fingers every time.

 

 

***

 

She immediately feels the change, the new, insistent heaviness of the baby’s presence, the way it’s drawing on her magic around it. A boy, already strong and fighting. The morning sickness is worse this time as well than it’d been during the first two pregnancies, like it’s intent on literally sucking the strength out of her body, too, but she’s smiling when she wipes her mouth with a towel from the side of the bath, tiles cold against her knees and her fingers shaking. 

For the first time in a long time she thinks of the name she’d always been wanting to give her child, her people’s way of giving their blessing once they’re sure that it’s going to be strong enough to live and it leaves her breathless with the force of the bright, sudden hope behind it. It’s an overwhelming, fierce kind of love she didn’t think she was capable of anymore.

Her other hand reaches down to her stomach, presses to the soft, barely there curve of it. 

_Loki_

Blood of her blood, bone from her bone, a child born of ice with wings of fire.

The one who would break them all.

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading I hope you enjoyed the ride as much as I did. I'm on wordwhisper.tumblr.com if you want to leave comments there or talk to me about them, I guarantee you I'll be happy about every single message/comment you send me here or on there.


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